Congrats, David! From the official press release:
The Vondel Translation Prize 2013 has been awarded to David Colmer for The Misfortunates, his translation into English of De helaasheid der dingen by Dimitri Verhulst. The jury was made up of British critic Paul Binding (Times Literary Supplement) and translators Sam Garrett and Paul Vincent.
The Misfortunates was published in 2012 by Portobello Books in London, with financial support from the Flemish Literature Fund. Colmer also translated two previous books by the same author, Problemski Hotel (2005, Problemski Hotel) and Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2009, Mevrouw Verona daalt de heuvel af).
The Vondel Translation Prize is awarded every two years for the best book translation into English of a Dutch literary or cultural-historical work. The prize was established by the British Society of Authors and is financed by the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the Flemish Literature Fund. The winner receives the sum of €5,000.
David Colmer (b. 1960) is an Australian by birth and has lived in Amsterdam since 1992. He has previously won awards including the IMPAC Dublin Prize 2010 for The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s Translation Prize for his oeuvre as a whole (2012) and The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013 for The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker. As well as being the translator of a large and varied body of work, with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature he regularly acts as a teacher and mentor to new translators through, for example, the transnational Master’s Degree in Literary Translation in Utrecht and Leuven/Antwerp, and the British Centre for Literary Translation in Norwich.