John E. Woods (translator)
John Edwin Woods is a translator who specializes in translating German literature, since about 1978. His work includes much of the fictional prose of Arno Schmidt and the works of contemporary authors such as Ingo Schulze and Christoph Ransmayr. He also translated all the major novels of Thomas Mann (a feat comparable, in simple page count, to a wholly new translation of Proust), as well as works by many other writers. Woods lives in Berlin. Awards. For his edition of Schmidt's "Evening Edged in Gold", Woods received the 1981 U.S. National Book Award in category  Translation (a split award). He won the PEN Prize for translation twice, for that work and again for "Perfume" in 1987. Woods was also awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translations of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and Arno Schmidt's "Nobodaddy's Children" in 1996; as well as the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the translation of Christoph Ransmayr's "The Last World" in 1991. He was awarded the Ungar German Translation Award in 1995, and most recently the prestigious Goethe-Medaille from the Goethe Institute in 2008.