Schiller Foundation awards first prize and translation prize
Published: Monday, Apr 22nd 2024, 16:10
Retour au fil d'actualité
The Swiss Schiller Foundation has awarded its first prize and its translation prize. The prize for his first prose work "Take away the Alps" goes to Ralph Tharayil. The translation prize goes to Camille Logoz for her translation of the comic novella "Starkes Ding" into French.
Tharayil receives the Terra nova Prize, Logoz the "Viceversa" Prize. The Schiller Foundation announced on Monday that the form of Tharayil's first novel was already striking. The sentences are scattered almost unconnected across the pages. The question arises as to whether it is a long poem, a novel or a play.
Tharayil records the everyday lives of two siblings in a long monologue. According to the Schiller Foundation's appreciation, the narrowness of growing up in an emigration background becomes clear.
The children are at the mercy of their constantly working parents, who are perceived as a four-armed double being, but are also superior to them. Visits to schoolmates would make them aware of their foreignness. Tharayil was born in Switzerland in 1985 to Indian immigrants.
Translation of graphic novel
Lausanne translator Camille Logoz translated the graphic novel "Starkes Ding" by Lika Nüssli into French as "Une Enfance de paille". The work received the Swiss Literature Prize 2023. In it, Nüssli records her father's memories of his life as a Verdingbub.
According to the foundation, the translator took on the challenge of rendering the precise depiction of a bygone rural German-speaking part of Switzerland in French. In a glossary, she explains the specifically Swiss expressions she used.
The Schiller Foundation praised Logoz for perfectly capturing the dry humor and laconic, never lachrymose tone of the first-person narrator. Logoz lives in Zurich. She also translated the classic "Frauen im Laufgitter" ("Femmes sous surveillance") by Iris von Rothen.
The Viceversa Literature Platform Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2023, is endowed with CHF 5,000. It honors translations of works of Swiss literature into another national language. The Schiller Foundation has been awarding the Terra nova Prize for first works in the amount of CHF 5,000 to Swiss authors since 2013.
©Keystone/SDA
French 
English 
German 
Spanish 
Arabic