EU honours Europe’s best new authors | New Europe | Metaglossia: The Translation World | Scoop.it

The European Commission and Parliament produce enormous amounts of documents, reports, communications and more, yet nobody would call this literature, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t recognize a good book.

Culture Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou and Doris Pack MEP, Chair of the European Parliament's Culture and Education Committee are celebrating the best of Europe’s writers at the award ceremony for the EU Prize for Literature, first awarded in 2009.

The prize is open to writers from the EU, candidate countries, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein from the European Economic Area and Balkan states. Each year, a dozen nations are chosen and national juries select one winner.

This prize has a purpose, to celebrate the diversity of Europe’s fiction writers and help them find an audience outside their home country.

“Ensuring that literature crosses borders is not only good for authors and publishers, who want to reach new markets; it is also great for readers who have more choice and are exposed to works which they might never otherwise have come across,” said Commissioner Vassiliou.

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Twelve prize winners will receive €5,000 and priority for funding for translating their books into other languages.

The Commission spends €3 million a year on literary translation and more than 100 translations have been made so far of books by the prize winners, covering 19 languages, with EU funding. The book trade is no paper tiger, it adds €23 billion to the EU’s GDP and employs 135,000 people.

One of last year’s winners, British novelist Adam Foulds, found another benefit, “I was able to spend time with the other writers and make their acquaintance, and get a sense of life for novelists in other languages and countries. He added, “What was great about it was the very strong sense of a kind of fraternal warmth between writers from very different places. There’s solidarity between us.”

The ceremony itself was relaxed and informal, and like a good book, not too long.