By a large majority of votes, the new translation of the Bible into Dutch won the national book prize for 2005 in the Netherlands. The result is all the more surprising as the Bible was not even a candidate for the prize and this is the first time ever that a non-candidate title has won it. The CPNB Foundation, which promoted the event, announced that of the 90,000 people who voted, some 72 percent chose the Bible; the number of voters in this year’s prize has almost doubled since last year, when there were some 40,000 voters. “It’s fantastic news, the Bible becoming the book of the year. We would never have dreamt of such a thing”, was the first comment of the director of the Catholic Bible Foundation (KBS), Ph. Van Heusden. The new translation of the Bible was sponsored by the KBS and the Flemish Bible Association, which have already published various co-editions in the course of 2005. Sales of the new Bible have broken all records: between October 2004 (when the edition was published) and today some 650,000 copies have been sold, of which 390,000 in the first three months, from October to December 2004, at a rate of 3,900 copies per day; over the last two weeks, thanks to the publicity created by the award of the prize, a further 10,000 copies have been sold.
