Congratulations to our 2020 winner, Fitzcarraldo Editions for Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, tr. Frank Wynne.
All five shortlisted presses will receive £2,000, as a show of solidarity in difficult times.
The majority of the prize fund is kindly donated by our partners and sponsors at the University of East Anglia, through the UEA Publishing Project. We are immensely grateful for their support.
The rest of the prize money is raised through donations and through our small press book club. Thank you to everyone who has given us money and books over the last year.
The prize would not be possible without the support of Arts Council England. We thank them for their continuing support: not only of us, but also the many small publishing projects they fund and encourage.
Winner 2020
Fitzcarraldo Editions for Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, tr. Frank Wynne
Frank Wynne - one of the best translators working today - does a masterful job of capturing Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s rich, lyrical and inventive style as he explores the (mis)fortunes of a peasant farming family in France across five generations, against a backdrop of war, economic disaster and industrialisation. This is no pastoral - it is a savage and brutal book, replete with sex and violence, which is also spellbinding, strange and immersive.
Fitzcarraldo Editions is a small publisher based in Deptford, South-East London. It was founded in 2014 by Jacques Testard, who still runs the company. Their remarkable eye for talent has seen them publish the Nobel Prize winners for 2015, Svetlana Alexievich, and 2018, Olga Tokarczuk, in each case before they won the prize.
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, born in 1981, is one of France’s most exciting and ambitious young writers. He is the author of Pornographia, Le sel, and Une éducation libertine, which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. Animalia, his fourth novel, is his first to appear in English. Frank Wynne is a literary translator. He has translated works by Francophone authors including Michel Houellebecq and Patrick Modiano. He also translates from Spanish. His work has earned various awards.
Shortlist
Longlist
Our 2020 judging panel is:
Roland Gulliver
Roland joined the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2007 where he is now Associate Director. Previously he worked in Belgium for 6 years as Arts Manager at the British Council and created the Glasgow Programme for the Six Cities Design Festival. He was a judge for the 2017 SAY Award and is an Academy Member for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Sophie Lewis
Sophie is an editor and a translator from French and Portuguese. Previously Europe office manager at Dalkey Archive Press and senior editor at And Other Stories, she is currently managing editor at the Folio Society. In 2018 her translation of Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait was shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes. In 2016 she co-founded Shadow Heroes, a workshop series for students on critical thinking through translation: www.shadowheroes.org.
Sam Mills
Sam studied English at Oxford University. She is the author of The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair) and several award-winning YA novels publisher by Faber. Her next book, a memoir about being a carer, The Fragments of my Father, will be published by Fourth Estate in 2020. She has contributed to various anthologies, including Know Your Place (Dead Ink) and Disturbing the Beast (Boudicca Press).She is the co-founder and MD of indie press Dodo Ink.
