Katarzyna Leszczyńska was born in 1969 and studied German studies at the University of Warsaw. She then graduated from the School of Social Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences and completed her PhD at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt (Oder). She lives in Zurich, Warsaw and in the Białowieża Forest. Since 2003, she’s translated texts by, among others, Herta Müller, Aglaja Veteranyi and Mariella Mehr. She also publishes essays about German-language literature in magazines such as Pogranicze, Literatura na Świecie and Przegląd Polityczny, as well as organising literary trips.
Sven Sellmer was also born in 1969. He studied philosophy, Indology and classical philology in Kiel. Since 2000, he’s been working as an Indologist, initially in Kiel, and, since 2004, at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań, where he teaches Sanskrit and Indian philosophy. Since the mid-nineties, he’s translated essays, prose and humanities-related texts from Polish, English and Sanskrit into German. His Polish-German translations include the oeuvres of Henryk Elzenberg, Czesław Miłosz, Marian Pankowski and Zyta Rudzka.
The gala award ceremony, organised by Deutsche Polen-Institut, will take place on 12 June 2015 in Hesse State Archives in Darmstadt.
Every other year, a German and a Polish translator receive prizes for building bridges with language. The candidates are nominated by a German-Polish jury chaired by Professor Karl Dedecius, the doyen of German translators of Polish literature and a distinguished mediator between Germany and Poland. The prize was created jointly by Karl Dedecius and the foundation in 1981 to recognize outstanding work by Polish translators of German. It was supplemented by a promotional prize for Polish translators in 1992, and has been bestowed as a twin prize for both German and Polish translators since 2003.
Author: Janusz R. Kowalczyk. Sources: www.karl-dedecius-preis.de, www.deutsches-polen-institut.de, www.bosch-stiftung.de. Transl. Agata Dudek, 28/04/15.