Team Parthian is excited to share some fantastic news!
Internationally acclaimed German translator Heike Reissig has won the ‘Auf geht's!’ (‘Let's go!’) scholarship which will enable her to translate Hello Friend We Missed You by Richard Owain Roberts, the winner of The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2020.
Hello Friend We Missed You is a poignant and comic novel about loneliness, Netflix, existing, rural life, money, Jack Black, and learning to live in the least excruciating way possible. Amy Lloyd believes that 'he could be the voice of our generation, I hope people are reading.'
The ‘Auf geht's!’ (‘Let's go!’) scholarship programme is part of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) strengthening package ‘Art and Culture’. The grants are aimed at helping freelance, professional artists of all disciplines during the COVID-19 crisis, whose main residence is North Rhine-Westphalia. The first round of the scholarship programme was announced and implemented in August 2020 with 105 million euros. A total of 14,500 artists have benefited from these funds so far. The state government is now providing an additional 90 million euros for the continuation of the programme, once again making 15,000 scholarships possible for the period from April to September.
On winning the grant, Heike commented:
‘I'm very happy that this scholarship enables me to translate Richard Owain Roberts' unique and touching debut novel Hello Friend We Missed You, which was voted winner of the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize by its readers.’
We are delighted that Heike will be bringing Roberts’ unique novel to a new readership, and are eagerly awaiting her translation!
