Europese Literatuurprijs 2026 - in conversation with Cécile Wajsbrot & Josephine Rijnaarts

Cécile Wajsbrot (1954) is a French writer who divides her time between Paris and Berlin. She has published twenty novels and also works as a literary translator. Her family fled Poland for France in the 1930s; during the war, several members of her family were murdered in Auschwitz. In 2016, she received the Prix de l’Académie de Berlin.

Wajsbrot has translated works from English and German into French, including books by Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefusis and Stefan Heym. She is also a journalist and has contributed to literary magazines including Autrement, Les Nouvelles littéraires and Le Magazine littéraire.

In Nevermore, the protagonist, a translator, is working on a translation of Time Passes, the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. As the reader is drawn into Woolf’s language and the translator’s craft of testing, searching and weighing different possibilities, it gradually becomes clear that the translator is grieving the death of a friend and trying to keep her pain at an intellectual distance.

Her reflections on Time Passes intertwine with stories of destruction and renewal, from the landscape around Chernobyl to New York’s High Line and the history of Dresden. In this way, Wajsbrot creates a wide-ranging novel that brings together a rich and layered landscape of themes and places.

Jury chair Lisa Weeda said: “At its heart, Nevermore is a work built around a small mystery, a tender story of pain surrounded by a mosaic of destruction, revision and reconstruction. Wajsbrot has written a profoundly European, worldly novel at a time when destruction, grief and devastation are part of everyday life, and yet we continue to repeat history — Nevermore, never again? (...) As a work of translation, Nevermore is a work of art in its own right, on top of the unique work of art that the novel already is. Josephine Rijnaarts faced the complex task of making the experience of translating an English classic into French conceivable and tangible in Dutch. She has succeeded brilliantly. If there is one novel that deserves this prize, it is Nevermore.”

Josephine Rijnaarts is best known for her translations from German, but she has also been translating from French since 2004, having studied French at university. She is an acclaimed translator and was awarded the Letterenfonds Translation Prize in 2021 for her “virtuoso courage as a translator, masterful command of Dutch and stylistic versatility.” She has been nominated several times for the European Literature Prize and the Filter Translation Prize.