The ‘Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation’ has been won by Letters to Anyone and Everyone, the English translation of Brieven aan niemand anders by Toon Tellegen, published by Querido, Amsterdam (1996, illustrated by Mance Post).

Translator Martin Cleaver received the award, a cash prize of £2000 (a good 2,300 euro), at a festive gathering in London on 20 January 2011. The Marsh Award is a biennial prize for the best English translation of a literary children’s book. The prize was established in 1996 to draw attention to the fact that less than 3% of English books for children and young people are translations. This is the first time that a work by a Dutch writer has won the prize.

In 2001, The Low Countries Yearbook devoted an article to Tellegen's work. Read it here.

The supreme sorrow of a letterless existence

Letters to Anyone and Everyone is a collection of letters and notes that Tellegen’s animals write to each other. According to the index in Toon Tellegen’s collected animal stories Misschien wisten zij alles (Perhaps They Knew Everything), there are 169 animals living in Tellegen’s storybook woods. His favourites appear to be the hedgehog, the frog, the cricket, and the beetle. The squirrel, the ant, and the elephant crop up so frequently that it would be impossible to list all the page numbers.

The squirrel dresses his epistle to the ant in a jacket and tie before sending it off into the snow on its way to its destination. There are letters in all shapes and sizes. The penguin writes on ice floes that have melted by the time they arrive, and the toad’s furious letter swells up, starts to glow, flies up into the air like a ball of fire and falls, sizzling, into the river. In these woods where the post flies around in such abundance, a letterless existence is synonymous with supreme sorrow, to be fought against with all one’s strength and creativity.

Letters to Anyone and Everyone is published by Boxer Books and illustrated by Jessica Ahlberg. This edition was produced with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature (Nederlands Letterenfonds), which is dedicated to the translation of Dutch literature abroad, amongst other things.