This year’s biennial Brockway Prize for translators of poetry from Dutch has gone to Judith Wilkinson. Awarded  by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the prize of  €5000 will be presented on 14 June 2013, during the 44th Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam.

The British poet and translator Judith Wilkinson came to prominence in England thanks mainly to  her translations of the Flemish poet MiriamVan hee and the Dutch poet Toon Tellegen. Her translation of Tellegen’s collection Raafvogels was published as Raptors in Britain by the Carcanet Press in 2011, winning that year’s prestigious Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation, awarded by The Poetry Society. Her third collection of  Tellegen’s poems, A Man and an Angel, appeared in 2013.

‘The poetry translations of Judith Wilkinson are sophisticated and skilled. She stays close to the Dutch original, does not deviate from the source text unnecessarily and yet manages to create real English poetry with the craftsmanship and the detailed precision of a jeweller,’ according to the jury report, in which Wilkinson is called ‘an outstanding poetry translator’.

An overview of Wilkinson’s (translation) oeuvre can be found in the Translations Database (http://www NULL.letterenfonds NULL.nl/vertalingendatabase/result NULL.php?vertaler=1458&alletitels=1&nrows=100) and on her own website (http://www NULL.judithwilkinson NULL.net/).

Poet and translator James Brockway was instrumental in bringing the poetry of Rutger Kopland, Hans Lodeizen, M. Vasalis, Gerrit Achterberg and many other Dutch poets to the attention of English-language readers. His translations won him the prestigious Martinus Nijhoff Prize in 1966, and a knighthood from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in 1997. When Brockway died in 2000, he left half his estate to the Dutch Foundation for Literature to promote the translation of Dutch poetry.

Apart from the Brockway Prize, a biennial translation workshop running over several days is organised for international poetry translators. This year the workshop will be dedicated to the translation to English of poetry by Mustafa Stitou. The results will be presented during the Poetry International Festival on Friday 14 June.

For detailed information, please click here (http://www NULL.letterenfonds NULL.nl).