It was published last year by Head of Zeus Books in the UK.
Launched by the Polish Book Institute in 2008, the award is given every year to an author of the best translation of Polish literature into English that was published in book form in the previous calendar year.
The story of Ice, a 1,200-page sci-fi novel, opens on July 14, 1924, in Warsaw, then under Russian rule, where a young Polish mathematician is awakened in the middle of the night by officials from the Ministry of Winter. He is sent on the Trans-Siberian Express to search for his long-exiled father.
Phillips worked on the translation of Ice for nearly a decade.
Grzegorz Jankowicz, director of the Polish Book Institute, said: “The scale of this translation challenge was monumental, in fact quite incomparable to anything else. This is a truly exceptional book, with a complex narrative and linguistic structure, filled with neologisms for which the translator had to find solutions in English. Thanks to Phillips’ talent, experience and persistence, Dukaj’s remarkable novel has found a suitable, inspiring literary form in English.”
Philiips is an Honorary Research Associate of the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, with degrees in Russian from the University of Durham and Polish from the University of London, as well as a PhD from the Institute for Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences.
She has written extensively on Polish literature. Her translations include Wiesław Myśliwski’s Palace, Narcyza Żmichowska’s The Heathen, Zofia Nałkowska’s Choucas and Boundary, as well as short stories by Agnieszka Taborska and Piotr Paziński.
In 2015, she won the Found in Translation Award for her translation of Nałkowska’s Choucas.
Past recipients of the Found in Translation Award include Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Bill Johnston, Jennifer Croft and Anna Zaranko.
(mk)