JOHN EDWIN WOODS, was an American translator born on this date (d: 2023); Woods  specialized in translating German literature, since about 1978. His work includes much of the fictional prose of Arno Schmidt and the works of contemporary authors such as Ingo Schulze and Christoph Ransmayr. He is perhaps best known as the translator of all the major novels of Thomas Mann, in addition to  works by many other writers. Born in Indiana, Woods lived for many years in California before moving to Berlin in 2005.

After graduating from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, with a bachelor’s degree in the mid-1960s, Mr. Woods studied English literature at Cornell before attending the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa. In the 1970s, he continued his theological studies in West Germany, where he also learned German in a language immersion class at the Goethe Institute. He married his teacher, Ulrike Dorda. (They would later divorce, and he would come out as gay.)

For his edition of Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold, Woods received the 1981 U.S. National Book Award in category Translation (a split award). He won the PEN Prize for translation twice, for that work and again for Perfume in 1987. Woods was also awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translations of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Arno Schmidt’s Nobodaddy’s Children in 1996; as well as the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the translation of Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World in 1991. He was awarded the Ungar German Translation Award in 1995, and later the prestigious Goethe-Medal from the Goethe Institute in 2008.

Woods died in February 2023 in Berlin, where he had lived since 2005. He was 80. His husband, Francesco Campitelli, is his only immediate survivor,