Lisa Dillman, senior lecturer in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. The award recognizes an outstanding translation of a book into English from another modern European language.
Dillman was honored for her translation of Andres Barba’s Such Small Hands (Transit Books, 2017). Contest judges cited Dillman’s skill, going well beyond language to capture the tone and style that make the original so compelling. “As the story progresses, the tension that quickly builds between these characters owes much to the novel’s tight economy of language, and to Dillman’s ability to recast Barba’s taut sentences and disconcerting syntax in her own comparably unsettling English translation,” the judges’ citation reads.
Dillman was raised in California and studied Spanish at the University of California, San Diego before completing a master’s degree in Spanish literature at Emory University and a second master’s degree in literary translation from Middlesex University in London.