John E. Woods


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, as well as works by many other writers. Woods lives in Berlin.

Selected translations

[Alfred Döblin]

For his edition of Schmidt's Evening Edged in Gold, Woods received the 1981 U.S. National Book Award in category Translation.
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.