The College warmly congratulates Jeffrey Zuckerman who wins the 2025 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize with his translation of Jellyfish Have No Ears (MacLehose) by Adèle Rosenfeld.
This year the judges of the prize were Minna Jeffrey, Monica Cure, Aoife Cantrill and Thomas Murphy. They wrote:
Adèle Rosenfeld’s ‘Jellyfish Have No Ears’ is a novel at once finely tuned and hazy. We follow the narrator Louise as, faced with worsening hearing loss, she circles round the question of whether or not to get a cochlear implant. In Rosenfeld’s text meaning is called into question, made elusive and slippery. The novel asks how we making meaning out of sound and, especially, the absence of sound. Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation from the French is meticulously and lovingly executed, playful and enriching. In prose that is often poetic, and at other times infused with wry, even acerbic, humour, Rosenfeld and Zuckerman offer compelling and pressing provocations about communication, isolation, community, and what it means to hear.
The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It was founded by Lord Weidenfeld and is supported by New College, The Queen’s College, and St Anne’s College, Oxford.
