John E. Woods

John Edwin Woods (August 16, 1942 – February 15, 2023) was an American translator who 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 also translated the four major novels of Thomas Mann, as well as works by many other German writers.

Early life and education Woods was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and lived with a foster family in Fort Wayne Indiana until 1949. He attended Wittenberg University, then studied English literature at Cornell and the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He learned German at the Goethe-Institute, and married his teacher, Dr. Ulrike Dorda. 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.