Established by the Polish Book Institute in 2008, the annual award honours the best translation of Polish literature into English published in book form in the previous calendar year.
Ice, a 1,200-page alternate-history science-fiction novel, was published in the United Kingdom last year by Head of Zeus.
The story opens on July 14, 1924, in Warsaw, then under Russian rule. It follows a young Polish mathematician who is awakened in the middle of the night by officials from the Ministry of Winter and sent on the Trans-Siberian Express to search for his exiled father.
Phillips worked on the translation for nearly a decade.
Grzegorz Jankowicz, director of the Polish Book Institute, said the scale of the project was "monumental" and required navigating a complex narrative and linguistic structure, including numerous neologisms.
"Thanks to Phillips’ talent, experience and persistence, Dukaj’s remarkable novel has found a suitable, inspiring literary form in English," Jankowicz said.
Phillips is an honorary research associate at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She holds degrees in Russian from Durham University and in Polish from the University of London, as well as a doctorate from the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Literary Research.
She has written extensively on Polish literature and translated works by Wiesław Myśliwski, Narcyza Żmichowska and Zofia Nałkowska, as well as short stories by Agnieszka Taborska and Piotr Paziński.
Phillips previously won the Found in Translation Award in 2015 for her translation of Nałkowska’s Choucas.
Last year's award went to Mira Rosenthal for her translation of Tomasz Różycki's To the Letter.
Past recipients include Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Bill Johnston, Jennifer Croft and Anna Zaranko.
(mk/gs)
Source: instytutpolski.pl, bookinstitute.pl