The Goethe-Institut announced that Max Lawton has been awarded the 2026 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of the mammoth, thousand-plus-page German novel “Schattenfroh” by Michael Lentz.

The jury statement accompanying the announcement was breathless: “The narrative voice shifts frequently—at times frenetically—between archaic forms, colloquialism and dialect, fairy-tale, Christian or kabbalistic incantation, rumination or ribaldry, even poignance, and the jury marveled at Lawton’s agility in capturing each change of shade. Max Lawton’s Promethean translation brings Lentz’s extraordinary literary experiment to life for readers of English the world over.”

The award is next in line in a spate of recent successes for the translator. Max Lawton recently won the AATSEEL award for the Best Prose Translation into English for his “Red Pyramid: Selected Stories” by Vladimir Sorokin (NYRB 2024).  In recent years, Lawton has also released a number of other translations of Vladimir Sorokin’s work, including – “Their Four Hearts” (Dalkey Archive Press 2022), “Telluria” (NYRB Classics 2022), “Blue Lard” (NYRB 2024), “Dispatches from the District Committee” (Dalkey Archive Press 2024), and “The Sugar Kremlin” (Dalkey Archive Press 2025).

Image Credit: Ecem Lawton