Marie Vrinat-Nikolov winner of the Mallarmé foreign translation prize 2024

The Prix Mallarmé étranger de la traduction, launched in 2022, values both the work of translators who work to open up new literary perspectives and foreign poetry translated into French.

This literary prize will be awarded to Marie Vrinat by the Académie Mallarmé on December 17 at the Maison de la Poésie in Paris.

Marie Vrinat-Nikolov

Marie Vrinat, a former student at ENS de Sèvres and agrégée de Lettres classiques, is a literary translator, university professor of Bulgarian language and literature and translation theory, and co-director of the master's degree in literary translation at Inalco. She is the author of Bulgarian textbooks, articles and books on the history of Bulgarian literature, the history of translation in Bulgaria and literary translation thought. She has translated into French, both prose and poetry, some fifty books by Bulgarian authors, both classic and contemporary, to whom she dedicates the site Ecrivains de Bulgarie.

For her activities in translation, teaching the Bulgarian language and promoting Bulgarian culture in France, she has been awarded the title of docteur honoris causa from Sofia University "St Clément d'Ohrid" in February 2024, and several literary prizes, including the Prix Etienne Dolet de traduction 2021 and the Prix Fragonard de littérature étrangère 2022.

From Georgy Gosdpodinov, she has translated: Un roman naturel, novel (Phébus, 2002; reissued Intervalles, 2017); L'Alphabet des femmes, stories (Arléa, 2003, reissued paperback 2014); "D.J. ", play (Paris, Leo Scheer, La Revue littéraire, no. 37, summer 2010); Physique de la mélancolie (Intervalles, collection Sémaphores (Inalco/Intervalles), 2015, Prix Jan Michalski 2016); Tous nos corps, ultra-short stories (Paris, Intervalles, 2020); Le pays du passé, novel (Paris, Gallimard, "Du monde entier", 2021).

Guéorgui Gospodinov

Guéorgui Gospodinov, is a poet, playwright and literary researcher. He is one of the most popular and widely translated Bulgarian authors in the world, with works published in over thirty languages. In French, all his works have been translated by Marie Vrinat.

He has received several national and international literary awards, such as the Jan Michalski Prize 2016 for his novel Physics of Melancholy and the International Booker Prize 2023 for the novel Time Shelter (The Country of the Past, Gallimard, 2021).