Tapani Kärkkäinen awarded with the Transatlantyk Award
Grzegorz Jankowicz, Director of the Polish Book Institute, emphasized the laureate’s enormous translation achievements and his contribution to promoting Polish culture:
Tomasz Chłoń, head of the Polish embassy in Finland, said in his laudation for the laureate: “His impressive body of work testifies as much to quantity as — above all — to quality. I once wrote that Tapani’s day lasts 72 hours. He did not deny it. So I judged correctly. The quality of his work is best attested by Finnish critics. They write of extraordinary precision, a feel for language, and that he has become an irreplaceable translator for contemporary Polish literature in Finland.” Tomasz Chłoń added that today — also thanks to the soft power of literature — Poland is a close country to Finland.
The Transatlantyk Award 2026 — laudation
This year’s laureate was selected by the Award Chapter consisting of: Xavier Farré, Hatif Janabi, Grzegorz Jankowicz, Abel Murcia, Tomasz Pindel, Anna Wasilewska and Aga Zano. The prize is worth PLN 50,000. This year’s laureate also received a commemorative diploma and a statuette designed by Justyna Żak.
Transatlantyk Award is The Book Institute’s award for the most outstanding promoters of Polish literature and culture abroad. Its laureates may be a translator, publisher, critic or cultural animator whose work has contributed to increasing the presence of Polish literature in their country.
The history of the Transatlantyk Award dates back to 2005, when during the first World Congress of Translators of Polish Literature it was awarded to Henryk Bereska, a German translator of the giants of our literature. To date the honour has been bestowed on such luminaries as Anders Bodegård (Sweden), Albrecht Lempp (Germany), Ksenia Starosielska (Russia), Biserka Rajčić (Serbia), Pietro Marchesani (Italy), Vlasta Dvořáčková (Czechia), Yi Lijun (China), Karol Lesman (the Netherlands), Bill Johnston (United States), Laurence Dyèvre (France), Constantin Geambaşu (Romania), Lajos Pálfalvi (Hungary), Antonia Lloyd-Jones (United Kingdom), Hendrik Lindepuu (Estonia), Ewa Thompson (Poland), Tokimasa Sekiguchi (Japan), Silvano De Fanti (Italy), Hatif Janabi (Iraq), Vera Verdiani (Italy), Abel Murcia (Spain) and Xavier Farré (Spain).
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Tapani Kärkkäinen (b. 1962) is a translator of Polish literature into Finnish. He has translated books by Manuela Gretkowska, Ryszard Kapuściński, Hanna Krall, Małgorzata Lebda, Andrzej Sapkowski, Bruno Schulz, Wojciech Szabłowski, Wojciech Tochman, Olga Tokarczuk, Michał Witkowski, and stage plays by, among others, Sławomir Mrożek, Tadeusz Słobodzianek, and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. He is the author of guides to the culture of Warsaw and Kraków and of an anthology of Central European café texts entitled Kadonnutta kahvilaa etsimässä (“Searching for the Lost Café”). He has also translated Polish feature films and documentaries. For the Finnish translation of Tokarczuk’s Bieguni he received the Mikael Agricola Prize.
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This year, for the first time, the monetary award was accompanied by a new statuette by Justyna Żak – a visual artist, a graduate of the Department of Ceramics and Glass at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław and a scholarship recipient of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.
“The statuette represents a symbolic fragment of the ocean – a space that is infinite, deep and multidimensional, like literature. Its undulating surface reflects what is visible: words, form and rhythm. The depth conceals meanings, emotions and stories that develop beneath the surface. Each creator immerses themselves in the same space but follows their own current. Therefore each statuette is a separate fragment – an individual narrative that only in comparison with others reveals the fullness of the whole,” explains Justyna Żak about her design.
The statuette was made of soda and lead glass, shaped in a process of melting in an electric furnace. It consists of two glass elements that, after thermal treatment, were permanently joined.