On the 1st July 2012, Austrian translator Leopold Federmair and Ljubomir Iliev, Bulgarian translator of Austrian literature, were awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation 2011 in Klagenfurt. Both translators were honoured for their achievements in literary translation.

Leopold Federmair’s oeuvre as a translator from French, Spanish and Italian includes writers like José Emilio Pacheco, Michel Houellebecq, Michel Deguy and Ricardo Piglia. Federmair currently lives in Japan.

Ljubomir Iliev is an extremely prolific translator of German-language classics as well as modern literature. He received the State Prize for his excellent translations of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch.

The twin prize is awarded annually for an outstanding translation of a work by a contemporary Austrian writer into a foreign language and of a work of contemporary foreign literature into German. Each of the prizes is endowed with 8,000 Euros and is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.