[Here’s another one for the “I know it’s a press release but I think you’ll actually be interested” files. Congrats to Melville House, the author, the translator, and everyone else to whom congrats are due; and a hearty cheers to Liran Golod, tireless arts champion at the Israeli Consulate, provider of this notice. – JT]

New York, March 11, 2010 – Melville House’s The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, has won the 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.  Organized by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the past year. This year the awards ceremony was hosted by Manhattan independent bookstore Idlewild Books.
“We’re delighted to receive this award on behalf of the author, Gail Hareven,” said co-publisher Dennis Loy Johnson, “as it represents what we see as part of our mission at Melville House: Not just to publish both fiction and nonfiction in translation for the sake of essentially preserving it, as if it were something on the verge of going extinct. That strikes us as a way of further ensuring its obscurity. Rather, we see it as our mission to trumpet that work loudly, and to work aggressively to get that work in the hands of as many people as possible, especially those who would not normally encounter translated literature.”
READ MORE >