Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s debut novel Tram 83 is the winner of this year’s German International Literature Prize 2017. He receives it with his translators Katharina Beyer and Lena Müller.
The International Literature Award is given annually by Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the foundation Elementarteilchen, for international prose translated into German for the first time. This will be the ninth time that the prize is being handed out. Fiston Mwanza Mujila will receive a prize of 20,000 euros ($22,300). Katharina Meyer and Lena Müller receive a prize of 15,000 euros for translating from the original French into German.
The ceremony for this year’s International Literature Award will take place on July 6 in Berlin, honoring author Mwanza Mujila and translators Meyer and Müller. The other six on the shortlist and their translators will also be celebrated, including Hamed Abboud and Larissa Bender, Alberto Barrera Tyszka and Matthias Strobel, Han Kang and Ki-Hyang Lee, Amanda Lee Koe and Zoe Beck, Ziemowit Szcerek and Thomas Weiler, as well as Fernando Mires and Thomas Böhm. South Korean author Han Kang, in particular, has a wide audience, having won the International Man Booker Prize in 2016 for her novel “The Vegetarian.”
This is not the first time that the novel has been in the running for a huge prize. He won the pan-African Etisalat Prize for Literature 2015 as well as got long-listed for the International Man Booker Prize and the Prix du Monde.
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