Past Award Winners Database

Set in a fictional slum at the edge of Port-au-Prince, Cécé is the portrait of a twenty-year-old orphan and a community in ruins, abandoned by a failed state and ruled by lawless gangs. Taking up occasional sex work to survive, Cécé struggles to hold on to her sense of self even as she navigates the dangers and treacheries of the worl...

The heart of The Front is resistance through imagination against a grim reality. Told by its young narrator, a nameless man-tree by choice, it’s the story of resistance as both refusal and transformation: refusal to submit to the world’s terms, and transformation of its debris, language, and discourses to build something new. Filled w...

Written in the Dongbei dialect of Northeastern China, the stories in Shuang Xuetao’s Hunter paint a portrait of a region marked by gritty pragmatism, dark humor, and magical realism. The main characters are often creatives, sometimes factory workers, many of them recluses who have relinquished all personal ties. Translator Jeremy Tiang ...

Replete with folktale, false piety, and real darkness, Irene Solà’s vibrant novel takes place in an old farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, where an old woman lies dying. The novel jumps in time through hundreds of years as it recounts the stories of the family’s women: the matriarch who made a Faustian deal for a husband only to trick the devil, and the ensuing generations of fallout. Meanwhile, these same women,...

Written in 1922 by Swiss-French novelist C. F. Ramuz, this climate catastrophe novel reads today like an eerie prophecy. An urgent telegram crosses the ocean, reaching an idyllic Swiss lakeside town: the gravitational system has collapsed, and the planet is hurtling toward the sun, heating up all the while. Translator duo Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan render Ramuz’s exquisite prose—its bold experiments with lexis, synt...

In Mending Bodies, a work of speculative fiction, a struggling government pushes its citizens to consider conjoinment, surgically attaching your body to someone else’s. May, a young woman writing her dissertation about the phenomenon, decides that this idea of sacrificing everything for the greater good might just be something she shoul...

Set in 1940s Mexico, Mothers follows women from different class backgrounds navigating the demands of motherhood in a deeply patriarchal society. At its center are Gloria Filipe, a mother of five from an upper-middle-class family, and Nuria Valencia, a working-class woman struggling with infertility and hoping to adopt. The story unfolds ...

In November 2021, 27 migrants drowned in the English Channel when their dinghy capsized after the French coastguard, wrongly insisting they were in British waters, failed to send help. Delecroix’s stream-of-consciousness novel inhabits the mind of the rescue worker facing accusations of negligence, probing complicity, collective responsibility, and our numbness to everyday horror. In Stevenson’s pitch-perfect translat...

Visions and Temptations closes Harald Voetmann’s historical triptych with a grotesque portrait of yet another pre-modern mind. Here we meet Othlo of St. Emmeram, an eleventh-century German mystic hallucinating on his deathbed, careening through heaven and hell in a fever dream of Boschian scale. Translator Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen inhabits a chorus of first-person monologue...

In When You Listen to This Song, award-winning French writer Lola Lafon reflects on identity, difference, hatred, and memory through the lens of Anne Frank’s legacy. In 2021, Lafon spent a night in the Amsterdam Annex where Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. Blending biographical details, personal reflections, and the history of A...

Jean Daive’s The Figure Outward recreates the fellowship and correspondence of two American poets, Charles Olson and Robert Creely, taking inspiration from Olson’s seminal visit to the Yucatan, where he fashioned himself into an “archaeologist of morning”—a poet of ancient beginnings and urgent reinventions. Daive’s poem is a ...

Anna Malihon’s Girl with a Bullet includes poems from 2012 onwards, but its emotional heart is the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It moves from tightly rhymed poetry to the free verse that Malihon believes better reflects the desperation and alienation of a refugee. Hers is a harrowing, powerful poetry of witne...

Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You a Severed Hand are war poems for the twentieth-first century, full of rage and wit and terrible truths. He writes of the violence in Syria from the frontlines of immigration in Europe—from self-satisfied Stockholm and the artsy precincts of Berlin—and he brings the news that no one wants to hea...

This collection of poems is by the iconic leftist, gay poet, Jaime Gil de Biedma, who wrote under Franco’s dictatorship and died of AIDS. Poems like these are written under pressure and in a plain style that is at once clear and surprising: the river “[s]peckled as a reptile”. Steeped in a cosmopolitan mix of literary traditions, the poems yearn for a lost Spain and lost ways of living. Whether intimate or political...

[Incognita Flora Cuscatlanica] is a book of poems disguised as an herbarium. Elena Salamanca explores the natural landscapes and naturalist archives of El Salvador to uncover the hidden poetry of plant life and its scientific terminology. Hers is a poem of beginnings and also what happened before the beginning, the primal life that lies under the cooled lava of our world: “L...

The Minotaur’s Daughter offers an intriguing selection of poems from Eva Luka’s five collections. Drawing on motifs from mythology, dreams, and folklore, Luka’s poems reimagine the female body as a wellspring of cultural, erotic, and spiritual power. James Sutherland-Smith’s translations capture Luka’s imagistic wildness but also her paradoxical discipline. A standou...

This collection focuses on an important period in Czesław Miłosz’s development as a poet—the seven years after World War II—when he was working as a diplomat in New York for the newly formed Polish People’s Republic and, later, following his defection to France. Most of these poems have not been collected before in English, and the translators ably bring across Miłosz’s erudition, lyricism, and vulnerability....

Ye is a poet of the countryside, preoccupied with the organic and the concrete. Yet his spare, painterly poems also open onto a metaphysical world just beyond reach. There is focus and quietness here, but also a sense of omens, myths and mysteries pressing in from outside and threatening violence round the edges. The flow of time seems to break down and open into dense moments of philosophy. The natural and the human worl...

Written as a series of infinitive phrases, Pascalle Monnier’s prose poems function as a quirky guide for living in an unpredictable world. They imagine alternative fates, embrace neuroses, and vacillate between travel and home. Translator Cole Swensen’s playful syntax skillfully recreates Monnier’s charming confessions and witty asides. For instance: “To fall asleep every night—because sooner or later you must, ...

This is Catalan poet Ana Gual’s eighth collection but the first to be translated into English. It is powered by what translator AKaiser calls the “beguiling quotidian”; a world that is at one familiar but strange. Poems are often rooted in the local landscape but simultaneously represent an exploration of language: “I didn’t want a map. / I wanted a machete to clear a path”. Gual offers insights into an intima...

Translator Minna Zallman Proctor takes on Cesare Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucó—a rewriting of Greco-Roman myths concerning life, death, love, and suicide—and spins new life into this oft-neglected narrative skein. Proctor embodies the role of Arachne in more ways than one, charming and capturing the reader with a substantial fore...

In this gripping coming-of-age novel set in 1990s Rome, you can feel the level of care Hope Campbell Gustafson put into her translation. The reader witnesses the teen protagonist’s emotions, thoughts, and questions as she navigates how class, gender, and disability shape the relationships closest to her and how she interacts with the rest of the world. With creativity, wit, and empathy, Gustafson pays close attention to...

Ann Goldstein once again confirms her mastery of Italian translation with her rendering of a novel-length fable that alternates between the stories of Barbara and Nicola, two young survivors of Europe’s most devastating earthquake, the 1908 convulsion which killed more than 120,000 people in and around Messina and Reggio Calabria. The reader experiences the impact of these dreadful circumstances from the protagonists’...

Sean Wilsey’s audacious translation is a high-stakes gamble: he renders Luigi Pirandello’s summa story as One, None, and a Hundred Grand—a title that sets readers up for the rollicking ride to come. Wilsey’s translational choices will make scholars scream and would have made the Nobel prizewinner cheer. This translation rechristen...

Translation can be a way of bringing attention to voices and stories not often heard—and to the systems that too often silence them. Jeanne Bonner has stewarded that work with her translation of Edith Bruck’s short story collection, where Jewish girls come of age during World War II. Bonner captures the joy and pain that young girls face before, during, and after displacement and genocide. The conflicts in each story ...

The Magpie at Night is a dazzling collection from one of China’s most celebrated female poets, Li Qingzhao. She is best known for her short lyrics, a form called Cí (詞), composed to accompany songs. Wendy Ch...

Lyrical, restless, cerebral, and indelible, Zhang Zao’s Mirror embraces Tang poetics and converses with Blake, Keats, Rilke, Tsvetaeva, and Stevens. Via Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s incandescent translation, Zhang Zao’s poems, while often evoking a spec...

Ye Hui’s The Ruins intuitively shapeshifts between the metaphysical and the organic, transforming a “crawling” soul into a black bird, then a “lost dog” that “follows human shadows.” Embracing fate, the blooming of fruit trees in the poet’s universe requires “an eeri...

Hŏ Ch’ohŏi (1563-1589), better-known by her pen-name Nansŏrhŏn (“white orchid”), is among Korea’s most important female poets, celebrated for the unrivaled perfection of her powerful, lyrical hansi (Korean poetry written in classical Chinese) steeped in the literary tradition of China’s Tang Dynasty. Despite its adherence to...

Today’s Morning Vocabulary mediates the poet’s elegiac attempt to inventory the past with his inevitable trajectory toward the present. Via Stine An’s ingenious rendering, Yoo Heekyung’s poems shift balletically between erasure and emergence, burden and release, a “howl-like self” and “an empty bell.” Rephrasing Descartes, Yoo He...

Anoxia, about a widow’s search for art, love, forgiveness, and purpose, does just what great writing should: make readers deeply feel for characters, who here exist in the shadows of climate change and death. The lost technology of daguerreotype becomes a metaphor for grief over all that passes: people, places, and fixed ideas about ourselves and others. West’s sensiti...

An English-language debut for both author and translator, Catalina Infante’s semi-autobiographical The Cracks We Bear offers a complex portrait of pregnancy and motherhood. In crystalline vignettes, the narrator reflects on her tumultuous relationship with her late mother, musing on her communist mother’s exile in Cuba and France, and...

The Holy Innocents, by Cervantes award-winner Miguel Delibes, portrays severe social inequality and exploitation on an estate in rural Extremadura, where the landowning class’s dehumanization of laborers culminates in blood revenge. This is an important example of Delibes’ critique of social inequity and his aesthetic project of p...

In Irene Solà’s I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, a country home plays host to overlapping generations of the women who have inhabited it, with a sumptuously dark and ghostly ambience that defamiliarizes the modern as capably as it plunges us into the past. Mara Faye Lethem’s translation brilliantly brings this world to...

In My Clavicle, Premio Herralde-winning writer Marta Sanz embodies the role of a writer with unsolved chronic pain, meandering through autofictional musings on art, aging, illness, and dislocation in the face of societal and economic decline. The narrator’s voice, full of life and boldly and energetically translated by Katie King, is th...

Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s novel Carnaval Fever, beautifully translated by Madelaine Arenivar, pitches readers head-first into the vivid world of Ainhoa, a brilliant, perceptive, irrepressible girl growing up in a multigenerational Afro-Ecuadorian family. The story and its narrator are both irresistible, thanks to Arenivar’s confident and ...

Exercises 1950–1960 is a collection of poems in which political force culminates in the ordinary. Yannis Ritsos refuses to separate the texture of summer from the lives of those who labor. Across the collection, his poems attend to the sound of a miner’s black foot as closely as they do wildflowers. Spring Ulmer’s translation preserves a poetics in which attentio...

Jacqueline Leung’s translation of Mending Bodies renders Hon Lai Chu’s prose with sophisticated precision. Leung navigates a novel that moves between philosophical inquiry and lived experience, sustaining multiple registers with remarkable control. Hon Lai Chu weighs the self and the collective against each other through an im...

Return to the Place I Never Left began as an oral history—interviews of Schiff for a film by Jean-Marc Turine—edited by Hilde Desmet, then was transformed into a memoir in verse by the author. The plainspoken lines narrate nearly unspeakable terror experienced by a man who survived four years in eight Nazi concentration camps. Translator Dani James—who grew up in Belgium...

W & E, M. L. Martin’s kaleidoscopic translation of Wulf and Eadwacer is a virtuosic display of imaginative empathy that sheds unexpected and variable light on this enigmatic 10th century Anglo-Saxon poem. (Is i...

Randi Ward’s lucid translation of Kim Simonsen’s luminous poems in What Good Does It Do for a Person To Wake Up One Morning This Side of the New Millennium skillfully navigates the poet’s continually shifting tone between the elegiac and the celebratory. Grief operates on several levels here: the poet mourns the loss of his beloved,...

AntoloGaia: Queering the Seventies, A Radical Trans Memoir by Porpora