Past Award Winners Database

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,...

The prolific, bold, ingenious Igiaba Scego is back with another riveting novel, this time set in the historical period in Italy known as the “Scramble for Africa” and present-day Rome and Mogadishu. The novel is narrated by two women: Lafanu Brown, a Chippewa-Haitian artist who makes her way from antebellum America to Rome in the late 19th century, and whose work enjoys considerable success, and Leila, an African-Italian art curator promotin...

Retranslating a classic is always a special challenge, especially when it means not simply creating a contemporary version that speaks to new readers or producing another interpretation of a widely beloved text, but trying to make a book happen for the first time in a way it never has. Michael F. Moore’s translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s great 19th-century Italian novel I promessi sposi, The Betrothed, is a happening—a literary event. While ...

An extraordinary work of scholarship and translation, Nancy Canepa’s unique collection of texts in The Enchanted Boot represents a comprehensive history of the fairy tale in Italy and, quite simply, it is a tour de force. A riveting literary history, this book provides stunning translations from the 15th century to the present day, stories from the better known—Basile and Calvino—to the lesser known—Laura Gonzenbach and Grazia Deledda (who w...

In a highly engaging colloquial style, Silvia Ferrara in The Greatest Invention explores mankind’s miraculous creation of written language by whisking us around the globe to marvel at hieroglyphs in Egypt, Rongorongo on Easter Island, the Phaistos Disk on Crete, stopping off along the way to ponder everything from knotted Inca quipu strings to inscribed Chinese turtle shells to modern-day emojis. Translator Todd Portnowitz matches the author’s scien...

Why read novels about the abominable figures of history? It’s not merely to learn about the past, but to think about the future, and even the form historical tale-telling takes. Antonio Scurati’s M: Son of the Century is a sweeping “documentary novel” about the critical years of Mussolini’s rise to power. Its translation required painstaking attention to historical detail and daunting amounts of research to render public speeches, private mess...

Anna Chiafele and Lisa Pike’s co-translation, which flows like an original, delivers a poignant re-elaboration of Penelope’s mythical figure. Connecting the reader to a fabric as old as time, the translators weave Silvana La Spina’s evocative tongue into a sensitive journey that turns Ulysses’s myth on its head and brings to the forefront a feminine tale whose power resides not in station or duty, but in the progressive self-discovery of one’s...

Stephen Twilley has given us a pitch-perfect translation of Curzio Malaparte’s unfinished chronicle of his stay in France and Switzerland in 1947 and 1948. As Malaparte writes in his preface, the diary is “a theatrical work brought to the boards of the page,” more fabulist than factual, overlain with unforgettable scenes, brief sketches, tall tales, and sweeping (at times dubious) pronouncements on the character of the French and the emergence of ...

Perhaps that skill in translating both humor and absurdity—two sides of the same coin—was an especially useful asset in Randall’s work as a political journalist. She wrote about her own work as a translator, “I like to work on fiction and non-fiction that’s just this side of untranslatable. Books that challenge what non-Italians know about Italian life, or challenge what we think constitutes a memoir, a novel, a work of history.” It is tempt...

Short-story writer Paolo Cognetti’s first novel—a meditation on the deeper meanings of friendship and family—has become an instant international classic in 38 languages, and for good reason. Probing the themes of male friendship and father-son relations, it casts the mountains in the role of a teacher whose lessons are taught through the challenging, exhilarating and often devastating ascents and descents of life. The characters, so tied to the It...

Translated by Elizabeth Harris, Antonio Tabucchi’s For Isabel, A Mandala leads the reader through a “mandala of consciousness.” This novella is at once a mystery, a magical-realist fairy tale, and a travelogue. As we follow the protagonist in his search for the lost Isabel, we move towards the center of the mystery through the mandala’s concentric circles, meeting strange and intriguing characters who seep out of the past or appear in incongruou...

Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything (1971), translated for the first time into English by Matt Holden, is unabashedly political—a novel, as Rachel Kushner says in her introduction, that is deeply original and that “succeeds on three different levels simultaneously, as a work of astounding art, a document of history, and a political analysis that remains resonant to the contradictions of the present.” In English, the complexity and nuance of th...

In The Story of the Lost Child, the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante brings full circle her visceral and compelling four-part saga, The Brilliant Friend. Through this cycle of novels, the author traces in acid the close yet conflicted bond between two women, Lila and Elena, from their childhood in the poor quarters of Naples to young adulthood, separation, and the disappearance of Lila decades later. Each character struggles to escape the searing oppression ...

At last, Jenny McPhee has beautifully restored this decadent, sprawling novel by a giant of Italian literature. An infamously pared-down version was all we had of the novel in English until now, perhaps since Morante’s impressive range of voices, tones, and forms requires its own kind of sorcery—difficult to achieve at all, let alone in a book of this scope and length. Yet McPhee renders the baroque glitter of Morante’s language and the muscle ben...

Ali Farah’s bildungsroman tells the story of Yabar, a young black Roman, and his coming of age in a multilingual and multiracial Rome that nonetheless presents significant obstacles to his sense of self and belonging. Hope Campbell Gustafson’s skilled translation seamlessly shifts between Yabar’s colloquial speech and the poetic grandeur of Somali-inspired tales passed on through generations. The result is a vibrant, fresh, and timeless novel that...

In bold, digressive prose, Her Side of the Story powerfully explores the intersections between the personal, the domestic, and the political. Its narrator, Alessandra, leads us through a shifting maze of a childhood and young adulthood in Rome under fascist rule. Jill Foulston vividly renders the nuances of Alessandra’s experience, capturing De Cespedes’s deeply introspective language in lucid, gripping English. Once censored for her work, De Cesped...

Dialect is a perennial challenge for translators, and this portrait of domestic brutality and frustrated artistic ambition is riddled with it: a Neapolitan that in the mouth of the narrator’s father becomes as creative and violent as the character himself. Oonagh Stransky demonstrates her expertise by retaining the original often enough to help readers develop a feel for the regional language, then rendering the rest in a knife-like English that is vu...

In incantatory prose—part reverie, part prose poem, part feast—The Hunger of Women asks us to reconsider the many forms of unacknowledged labor associated with homemaking, cooking, and caretaking. What would it mean to reclaim pleasure after a lifetime of limitation? Jamie Richards’s translation rises to the many hidden challenges of bringing Castaldi’s novel into English, including her hypnotic repetition and minimal punctuation; she recreates ...

The chickens have indeed come home to roost in this taut drama of an evening phone call that takes a series of wrong turns throughout a single night. Where is the place of desire, what is the role of sacrifice, when is it right to bottle things up, and when to let them out? These questions come brilliantly to life in Sacha Naspini’s theatrical novel, artfully translated into English by Clarissa Botsford with the same driving rhythm as the original. Ni...

Tim Parks’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s The Book of All Books into English is sometimes meditative, frequently confounding, and has perhaps a stark feeling of reading the Bible. Parks renders a translation that powerfully and gently guides the reader through a text loaded with biblical tension, regardless of the reader’s familiarity with the Old Testament. In Calasso, we find the tension between an avenging God requiring obedience without que...

Those familiar with Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon or the sisterly squabbles of Aldo Palazzeschi’s Le sorelle Materassi will find in Goliarda Sapienza’s latest volume a somewhat (excuse the repetition) familiar feeling, the portrayal of a world that once was, but is no more, and yet whose soul still permeates key strata of Italian society. Brian Robert Moore’s goldsmith-like approach to its translation carries us right to the ...

We are all fortunate that Allison Grimaldi Donahue has given us the gift of one of those books that fall into the category of “I should have always known about this, but no one ever told me.” The dead-on translation of Carla Lonzi’s strange, challenging, and genre-bending Self-Portrait bravely fulfils the translator’s stated objective of keeping the “spoken nature of the text…to allow English to perform Italian voices,” and we hope that ot...

A vertiginous, hybrid, genre-bending text, Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots at once adopts and subverts the medieval hagiographic tradition of 13th-century bestsellers such as The Lives of the Saints. Collapsing the distance between “saints” and “idiots,” the book explores the teeming insanities, ineptitudes, and pathologies of everyday life. Following the medieval model and structured as a calendar of sorts, it contains 31 stories ab...

Shortly before her death in May 2020, Frederika Randall completed her translation of Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H.G., concluding a remarkably rich career that introduced readers to iconoclastic works of Italian literature previously unavailable in English. Dissipatio H.G—the second book of Morselli’s translated by Randall, and Morselli’s last before his death by suicide in 1974—is a brief and haunting novel about a misanthropic outsider who g...

The 1980s brought a new wave of social mobility to Italy—textile barons, industrialists, and fine food and wine exporters started moving into the social milieux formally occupied only by nobles, intellectuals, and artists. The backwater Tuscan coast of Maremma—land of horses and farms, a marshy region whose own name is a profanity…Maremma—was gentrified in that period. Summers brought a new class of middle-class vacationers from Rome and Florenc...

In Paolo Giordano’s novel Heaven and Earth, translator Anne Milano Appel moves deftly among lexical dimensions spanning agriculture and ecology, theology and religious faith, romantic love and infertility treatments. The story of a grassroots organic farming initiative in Puglia, Heaven and Earth is rooted in the natural and emotional landscapes of a generation of environment-conscious Italians facing the insidious effects of living in the Anthropocen...

Set in the final stages of World War II, this novel is inspired by the real-life experience of a German woman who is conscripted to taste dishes to be served to Adolf Hitler. Rosa Sauer’s parents are dead, her husband is fighting on the eastern front and she is sheltering with his parents when the SS come knocking at her door. She and a handful of women, her fellow food-tasters, are forced to eat food that someone might have poisoned. Leah D. Janeczko...

Igiaba Scego’s sprawling modern epic of a novel tells us the story of two half-sisters and in the process drops us into contemporary Rome, a fascinating city of immigrants and refugees. Readers may see the Eternal City and Italy through an entire new lens – the lens of people who escaped all kinds of tragedies (in the case of one sister, Argentina’s Dirty War) to remake their lives in a new place. While weaving an engrossing story, Scego, who is o...

In this sophisticated and at times moody murder mystery, two men meet up in post-war Northern Italy and become friends as they sail around Lake Maggiore. The author, Piero Chiara, has expertly combined what the late John Gardner considered fiction’s two main storylines: a stranger comes to town and a man goes on a journey. The stranger in this case is the owner of a small sailing vessel, while the man who goes on the journey is a wealthy villa owner w...

Odysseus’s return to his wife Penelope after his twenty-year absence is masterfully retold in this intriguing novel that pries open the gaps in Homer’s narrative. Did she really fail to recognize him when he appeared before her dressed as a beggar? Malerba’s interpretation highlights Odysseus’s vanity and Penelope’s resentment when she realizes his first interest is to test out her fidelity. He has been fighting wars and seeking adventure whil...

This engaging novel follows four generations of a family living in the Alpine foothills outside Turin, spanning the late nineteenth century to the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 60s, as they climb out of poverty into a new world of TV dinners and other novelties. It’s Margherita Giacobino’s first appearance in English, and her prior accomplishments as writer and translator shine through in this finely crafted saga. Combining fact and fictio...

This is an astonishing book by any measure: it systematically trespasses on all boundaries and expectations—of genre, narrative conventions, human limits and morality itself. Billed as “A Novel,” it actually recounts the author’s harrowing experiences of life in the Nazi concentration camps, through an autobiographical lens we’ve not yet been privy to: that of an 18-year-old Italian girl from a well-to-do Fascist family who runs away from home...

A physician’s stirring account of his experiences with refugees, this relevant, timely book combines personal memoir and public indictment; Chenxin Jiang’s translation is pitch perfect. The narrative jumps around in time, weaving a collection of memories into a hopeful call to action. Director of the sole medical clinic on Lampedusa, Bartolo expresses compassion, confusion, disbelief and outrage. He reflects on his life’s parallels and differences...