Past Award Winners Database
[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...
As tightly-wound as its title suggests, 1,000 Coils of Fear is a kind of double-translation, interweaving (punk) Afro-German life in communist East Germany, the hazy presence of a father in Angola, and the painful, promising lessons of Black Lives Matter in America. Layne’s debut translation superbly handles the innovative formal play of Wenzel’s original, bringing out the political realism in 1,000 Coils of Fear’s surrealism: threaded...
Set decades into the future, when Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta has sunk underwater, Sabda Armandio’s 24 Hours with Gaspar blends pulp, sci-fi, and satire into a surreal and delicious piece of metafiction pastiche. A detective story at its most digressive and divergent, amid the chaos this very funny novel brews, it also surprises with nuanced reflections about memory, morality and choice. While Armandio’s non-linear plotting and spiky styli...
A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist vividly captures Hong Kong through a time-lapse of language: the reader feels the city’s slowly-shifting, changing landscape in each poem. Derek Chung is one of Hong Kong’s acclaimed living poets, his wide lines and architectural stanzas give a quiet, cozy warmth to the collection. May Huang’s English-language voice for Chung is precise and crisp, with moments of deep sadness and nostalgia. Huang meets each poe...
This translation of a contemporary Sudanese poet, marries the concision of the short lyric with the lush and ornate tradition of Arabic lyric poetry. Imagistic and sometimes surreal, this combination is exciting precisely because it is perhaps rarer in American and English poetry. Poems like “Panic Attack,” “My Corpse in the River,” and “From the Book of Erasure” demonstrate the juxtaposition of sense and sound these combination of dictions ...
Inventively and sometimes ingeniously translated by Maithreyi Karnoor, Shrinivas Vaidya’s A Handful of Sesame takes in a full century or more in the life of a family in a small region of southwest India, giving us an open-ended meditation on the many ironies, reversals, and hidden transformations that history brings. For all its wide range and vision, Vaidya’s novel is also astounding in its recovery of the minutest details of everyday life, giving ...
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A Last Supper of Queer Apostles is a collection of crónicas, or “short prose pieces that blend loose reportage with fictional and essayistic modes” by Chilean queer, anti-fascist artist and activist Pedro Lemebel. The voice pulsating through these pieces is both raucous and tender, teeming with bright rage and wisdom. Harper’s dazzling translation accomplishes what many translators dream of: preserving the essence of an iconic author’s...
“Yes, guys! Our Roger Milla is go, he is, to Mbeng! He told me he wanted boza: that he was going to walk all the way to Europe.” Max Lobe’s A Long Way From Douala, where “a funeral is also a party” is a rollicking ride (literally, being something of a road novel) through modern-day Cameroon, where the heaviness of contemporary realities is dealt with a light hand. The language, studded as it is with Camfranglais—a combination of French a...
A Naturalist’s Manor by Yan An, beautifully translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen, is a collection of rich observations about the wildness and wilderness that is life itself. The poems are full of unexpected transformations and declarations, such as the image of fallen butterflies merging with the image of a plane crash, after which the poet states that the “most important is that they all / Indiscriminately bind together death and love / And let t...
In the elegant and lilting translation by Andrea Lingenfelter, A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts traces the full arc of the Chinese poet Wang Yin’s 40-year career, as his lines course through unspoken travails and the freeing terrain of travels and encounters. At the crossroad of romantic reveries and subtle surrealism, this cosmopolitan photographer-poet paints dreamy pictures, “fill[ing] the photo album of night”: “rain-soaked / sugarcane ...
“A masterful work of storytelling, in the most expansive and exhilarating sense of the word! The translation achieves and maintains a brilliantly seamless conversational tone, engaging and full of colloquial charm as the stories emerge from our garrulous narrator, one after another, as layer upon layer of memories coalesce into a tender, homespun, epic retelling of one man’s life spanning the horrors and tragedies of World War II and its aftermath....
“Harsh” is perhaps the word to best describe the life of the bastard Andreas Egger, from the individual events that compose his life to the unforgiving landscape of the valley where he comes of age and later grows old after losing his wife at a young age and being held as a prisoner-of-war by the Russians during WWII. The world here is a threatening one, full of fatal illnesses, avalanches, and social relations that come difficult to Egger, but the ...
Just as Víctor del Árbol proves that noir fiction can be literary and even philosophical, with her translation of Above the Rain, Lisa Dillman demonstrates that translated prose can be edge-of-your-seat exhilarating. Shame, generational trauma, fidelity and infidelity, war and politics, the indignities of old age in western capitalism, and the turbulent histories of Europe and Morocco coalesce in one of the most emotionally charged works translated in...
Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality bridges the genres of memoir and novel, chronicling the demise of his body as he slowly succumbs to the spinal tuberculosis that would kill him at the age of twenty-eight. Michael Henry Heim, who learned Romanian solely to translate this book, was himself terminally ill when he began work on it; the translation is posthumously published. Heim, a master translator from many languages, brought all of his f...
Ungaretti’s first book-length collection of poems appeared almost a century ago. It transformed modern Italian poetry and announced the arrival of a unique voice in world poetry. Although conceived when he was fighting in the trenches of WWI, and penned on military postcards, blank spaces in letters, and the margins of newspapers, these poems are the antithesis of war and what it stands for. The slender poems celebrate life, inflecting its light, memo...
The brooding, threatening atmosphere in this tightly crafted novel where Old Man and Soon (soon to be thirteen) meet up regularly in a hideout among the hedges of a park is beautifully captured by Megan McDowell’s translation that is ever alert to the way Sara Mesa plays with readers’ expectations and tailors the unexpected. McDowell creates an absorbing English narrative of a tentative, yet intense, relationship. The reader feels impelled to read t...
“Vvedensky is a marvel: a poet too little known in Russia, and not known at all in the English-speaking world, is revealed as a major 20th-century world poet—wonderful, wonderfully strange, and haunting. The alchemical translation, with its shifty rhymes and non-rhymes, intense images and absent logic, knits and unknits reality before the reader’s eyes, walking not a line so much as a live wire.” Wrote the judges of this year’s award, renowned...
Nikki Giovanni wrote that “if you write a domestic poem / you’re foolish.” Valeria Román Marroquín is nobody’s fool, though: she knows the domestic is not just the domestic–it is the foundation of the legal, the national, the economic, the geopolitical. Noah Mazer’s translation of Marroquín’s raw, rangy reports on “the methodological structures of the [domestic labor] disciplines” fluidly conveys the exhilarating swerves between the...
Pierre Alferi, who recently passed away, was a major figure in contemporary French experimental poetry. A scholar of medieval literature, Alferi’s work is deeply informed by Postmodern critical theory as well as the lyrical traditions of both English and French poetry. The short fractured lyrics of And the Street capture the velocity and intensity of contemporary life, which somehow slowing time and attention to the smaller and often ignored moments t...
Marian Schwartz deftly departs from Constance Garnett’s 1901 English translation of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. In her translation, Garnett tended to smooth out Tolstoy’s unconventional use of language. Instead, Schwartz underscores and celebrates Tolstoy’s unorthodox choices grounded in aesthetic and ethical motives through her insightful and inspiring new translation.
Steeped in mythology, Another Life, the breathtaking debut of poet and translator Daniel Lipara, chronicles a series of events in the history of a family grappling with death. A deeply moving, intimate epic in fifteen parts, free of punctuation, both autobiographical and polyphonic, it is a haunting meditation on love, the sacred, place, memory, hope, and loss. Skillfully captured in Robin Myers’s extraordinary translation, it leaves readers awe-struc...
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...
This hefty tome, collecting for the first time in English four novels from the 70s and 80s by famed Spanish Royal Academy member Luis Goytisolo, more than meets its match in translator Brendan Riley, whose masterly command in rendering the epic sweep of its prose is everywhere in evidence. Loosely following the post-Civil War coming of age of a Catalan scion whose family sides with Franco’s Nationalists, Goytisolo’s tetralogy employs many of the fam...
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...
The alert and alerting Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon transforms mourning into everyday news of unjust deaths, and into a clarion call for envisioning new life under different rules. To read these poems is to pass through a geography of catastrophe, exclusion, and violence, and to reach their end is to glimpse the necessity for rebirth. Hyesoon’s expansive line, serial composition, and plural address blast open a vital, shamanistic space for th...
In an Oslo suburb steeped in violence and loneliness, four young men with immigrant backgrounds simply play the cards they were dealt. While children of their circumstances, stuck in a cycle of drugs and gang violence, they are also surprisingly funny, creative, and adaptable. And they have dreams—dreams of ordinary lives, jobs, families. Oliver Lovrenski’s debut novel, Back i...
Tankas are 5/7/5/7/7 syllable-count poems, which Tatsuhiko Ishii collapses into a single line and composes into sequences, each leading to or broken by the next. His often homoerotic poetry mingles Eastern and Western ideas and allusions in startling ways: The Book of Genji, The Waste Land, The Inferno, Yukio Mishima, and the Bible jostle with each other, often asyntactically, as translator Hiroaki Sato artfully conveys. Sato does not follow the syllabl...
Berlin • Hamlet, Szilárd Borbély’s first full poetry collection published in English is a “labyrinth of voices” with references and allusions to Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Hungarian poets Attila József and Erno Szép and a testament to an artist’s noble task who turns tragedy into art. Borbély’s poetry transcends personal narrative daring to tear open much of what he “would have preserved whole” because “in the light of real...
