Ian Fairley has won this year's £2,000 Schlegel-Tieck prize for Snow Part, his translation of Paul Celan's Schneepart. The announcement was made at a ceremony at London's Southbank Centre. Other prizes were awarded to translations from French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Arabic. The Times reported that 'The most eye-catching title on the list is undoubtedly Ian Fairley’s translation of Paul Celan’s Schneepart – a volume first published some months after the poet had taken his own life by throwing himself into the River Seine in Paris, in April 1970.'

Speaking to the Guardian, Ian Fairley said 'I feel very honoured to win. It means further recognition for the poet I translated. Celan's poetry can be masked by his reputation as a difficult poet. One of the things that attracted me to the book is that a lot of the poems are quite viscerally immediate. I translated it in the hope that it would be readable, and the fact of winning the prize helps me be hopeful that a few more people might open it and find something they like.'