The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2020 - 32

2019 ATA HONORS AND AWARDS RECIPIENTS continued

Photo by Thomas Hoeffgen

UNGAR GERMAN TRANSLATION AWARD
Tim Mohr
Tim Mohr is the recipient of the Ungar
German Translation Award for his
translation from German into English of
Sand, by Wolfgang Herrndorf (New York
Review Books Classics, 2018).
Sand is set in North Africa in 1972.
While the world is reeling from the
massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich
Olympics, a series of mysterious events
is playing out in the Sahara. Four people
are murdered in a hippie commune, a
suitcase full of money disappears, and
a pair of unenthusiastic detectives are
assigned to investigate. In the midst of it
all, a man with no memory tries to evade
his armed pursuers. Who are they? What
do they want from him? If he could just
recall his own identity he might have a
chance of working it out. This darkly
sophisticated literary thriller, the last
novel Wolfgang Herrndorf completed
before his death in 2013, is, in the words
of literary scholar and Germanist Michael
Maar, "the greatest, grisliest, funniest,
and wisest novel of the past decade."
Wolfgang Herrndorf (1965-2013)
studied painting at the Academy of Fine
Arts, Nuremberg. After graduating, he
moved to Berlin, where he worked as a
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The ATA Chronicle | January/February 2020

magazine illustrator. In 2001, Herrndorf
joined the art and writing collective
Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, eventually
contributing to their blog, Riesenmaschine
(Giant Machine). He published his
first novel, In Plüschgewittern (Storm of
Plush), in 2002. This was followed by a
collection of short stories, Diesseits des
Van-Allen-Gürtels (This Side of the Van
Allen Belt) in 2007, which received the
Ingeborg Bachmann Prize Audience
Award. In early 2010, he was diagnosed
with a brain tumor. His novel Tschick
(Why We Took the Car) was published just
months later and would eventually be
translated into 24 languages.
Herrndorf committed suicide in the
summer of 2013. His posts on Arbeit
und Struktur (Work and Structure), the
blog he started after receiving his cancer
diagnosis, have been published as a book
of the same name. An unfinished sequel to
Tschick, Bilder einer großen Liebe (Pictures of
Your True Love), was released in 2014.
Tim Mohr is a New York-based
translator and writer. In 2007, he
received the Three Percent Award for
Best Translated Book for his debut
translation, Guantanamo, by Dorothea
Dieckmann. In 2011, his translation of
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, by

Alina Bronsky, was included in the lists
for both Publishers Weekly's Best Books
and the Los Angeles Public Library's Best
Books for that year. His works have been
long- or shortlisted for the International
Dublin Literary Award.
Mohr has also collaborated on bestselling memoirs by musicians Gil ScottHeron, Duff McKagan of Guns 'n' Roses,
and Paul Stanley of KISS.
His own writing has appeared in The
New York Times Book Review, The Daily
Beast, Inked, New York Magazine, and
other publications. His history of the
East German punk rock movement,
Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock,
Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
(Algonquin, 2018) was longlisted for
the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and
included on best books of the year lists
by Rolling Stone, NPR music staff, Rough
Trade, Longreads, and the Chicago Public
Library, among others. Prior to starting
his writing career, he earned his living as
a club DJ in Berlin.
The Ungar German Translation Award may be
bestowed biennially in odd-numbered years for
a distinguished literary translation from German
into English that has been published in the U.S.
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The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2020

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