Past Award Winners Database

Once Upon Argentina is a poignant and unforgettable tribute to the narrator’s family (beginning with his great-great-grandparents) and those who finally...

Paraguayan Sorrow documents the ideological transformation of a young Spanish essayist from a member o...

The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, translated by Alex Andriesse, finally gives English-language readers access to an important voice of the postwar period in Italy. An essayist, poet, and translator of notable British and American authors, Campo presents a style informed by both a modernist sensibility and a deeply spiritual approach to the practice of writing. This volume, translated with a deft touch that brings the text fully to life, bring...

Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo translated by Aaron Coleman invites readers to the procession: you cannot look away from the spectacle of historical violence captured with incisive images that at first seem to present themselves with bold declaration. But listen in. Sometimes whispered, sometimes projected in the voice of a jester-ringmaster who cleverly slips in and out of various codes, Guillén’s poetry holds the fury of exact-know...

The Brush is marked by a startling lyricism while delivering a gut-punch. This book-long sequence of poems recounts a massacre in El Salado, in the Colombian countryside, where paramilitaries killed sixty people. The deliberate, predatory momentum of the text draws on the intimate everyday lives and enduring love of the people who survived and those who did not. Nature itself has a voice in this ecopoetic book, where the brush also witnesses th...

Weaving together voices from past and present that cross social and cultural boundaries, Chimera by Phoebe Giannisi, in the translation of Brian Sneeden, offers an epic, panoramic view on life through intimate, detailed observations of the goat-herding practices of the Vlachs in Northern Greece and Southern Balkans. The accounts, crisscrossing an array of prose and verse, comment on the relationships between human beings and animals and between...

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...

Afrizal Malna’s poetry is unlike any other. In Indonesia, an adjective has been crafted from his first name—Afrizalian—to describe his stunning mix of apparently disjointed images in deceptively simple phrases that combine realism and absurdism, philosophy and playfulness. Written in a moment of questioning for Indonesia, right after the collapse of the Suharta regime and in the wake of the Padang earthquake, this collection enlivens and convulses...

The greatness of The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, in Aaron Coleman’s translation, lies in the expansive scope of the specimens displayed and the ingenious characterization Guillén gives to each. The tour begins with the Caribbean (held in an aquarium) that bites and ends with the North Star melting helplessly. Along the way we encounter, for example: Aconcagua mountain with its white head and eyes of motionless stone; Hunger that roars li...

The book-length poem, which Edith Adams translates sagely as Guerrilla Blooms, began first, according to Daniela Catrileo, as a rhythm, “a sort of incessant mantra.” Even before setting it down on paper in Spanish, Catrileo chanted it into existence, revising it in the manner of ancient bards, crafting a lyric narrative of radical anachronism and epic scope that follows a band of indigenous Mapuche women confronting and resisting colonial o...

In this curation of 218 poems from Sanskrit and related languages, translators Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh bring to the general reader of modern English a highly accessible and enjoyable collection of wit and humor on the topic of love. Divided into chapters beginning with “How to Flirt” and ending with “How to Let Go,” the translations offer vivid depictions of the various states of being in love that will delight and surprise. Whether unsure o...

Somewhere in the constellation that includes Gertrude Stein and Sawako Nakayasu, the poetry of Lee Sumyeong blinks along, following its quest “to be here and be there.” In supple, glitchy lyrics, Lee–brought to us from South Korea via Colin Leemarshall’s meticulous, rigorous English–explores language’s quicksilver oddity, a material which, like light, is both particle and wave, structure and fluid. Refractory, prismatic, juddering yet ergono...

A collection of her work dating from immediately before and during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lost in Living by Halyna Kruk, translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, observes the daily, seemingly unimportant occurrences that lead to larger questions about the meaning of existence, and living in challenging, precarious moments. A girl’s collection of beetles in a matchbox, the thriving apple tree outside someone’s curtained win...

This latest translation of Najwan Darwish’s poems offers English-language readers the broadest presentation yet of his crisp, indelible glimpses into the bewildering experience of being an exile in one’s own homeland. Abu-Zeid once again conveys Darwish’s cool, steady tone, while curating poems from seven collections and the past ten years to show us the surprising range in these economical poems of contemporary Palestinian consciousness: “That�...

Sardonic, explicit, kinetic, raw, colloquial, and seriously punk rock poems compose this volume by Serbian writer Milena Marković. In her unmistakable voice, she recounts daily life during the Yugoslav Wars with a stubborn focus on everyday concerns even as bombs are falling. Elements of the Balkan avant-garde of the 1920s, Daniil Kharms and the Oberiiu, and Charles Simic (and shades of Baudelaire and Ginsberg) fuel these memorable poems. Steven and Ma...

With gripping imagery and unexpected diction, Domingo’s poems invite the reader to wander through Mexico City, traversing time, place, and language. Writing poetry proves inseparable from experiencing the city and its history: one powerful poem addresses the devastating 1985 earthquake; another, the layered, violent histories of Tlatelolco. Domingo’s fragmented style reflects the glimpses and shards of urban experience, offering a polyphonic script ...

A dystopian novel about government surveillance and book burning will inevitably bring to mind such classics as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Indeed, The Book Censor’s Library features thematic allusions to those works and linguistic clues to match and amplify them. But it also references, aptly if unexpectedly, Zorba the Greek and, as white rabbits appear in unlikely places, Alice in Wonderland. An insightful, engaging tale with surprising twists...

A provocative and brilliant modern-day epistolary novel that opens with an aggressive, free-flowing exchange of emails. The messages, full of energetic expletives, fly between an actress and a writer, triggered by his attempt to apologize for a ranting post in which he had berated her for no longer being the attractive woman men like him once idealized. As the exchanges unfold, Virginie Despentes draws out her characters’ emotional depth with remarkab...

Grandma Non-Oui has left to granddaughter Neda the legacy of a shared language from a land that was once home, the gifts of memory and connection, and the weight and recursiveness of history with its wars and threats to freedom. In intimate, tender conversations, grandmother and granddaughter retell the story of the elder’s life and thus create a rich narrative that blends the personal and the political. Through Kramer’s beautiful translati...

In Ixelles, a single mother who believes she has shed her past growing up in an impoverished, immigrant setting comes to grapple with the limits and power of stories. A former poet who now fabricates people and voices in service of powerful clients, Ruth is faced with the task of concocting voices supporting the demolition of the neighborhood she comes from. This layered novel that combines mystery, science fiction, and realistic fiction gives ...

Adèle Rosenfeld’s surreal exploration of deafness and intimacy arrives in English through Jeffrey Zuckerman’s luminous translation. As the protagonist slips further into hearing loss, the novel immerses us in a shifting sensory world, rendered with nuance and lyricism. Zuckerman masterfully preserves Rosenfeld’s balance of melancholy and absurdity, attuning English to the novel’s pulse of sonic absence. Jellyfish Have No Ears expands t...

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...

Rodrigo Fresán’s Melvill is less a biography than a restless literary labyrinth: part homage, part exegesis, part metafictional romp. Blending biography, literary criticism, and narrative digression, Melvill is a novel that swells with language. Vanderhyden matches Fresán’s labyrinthine style step for step, sustaining its highwire prose and melancholy wit without losing rhythm or coherence. His translation reads not as a shadow o...

This timely novel offers a moving portrait of Palestinian women across generations, living under occupation and in displacement. Its central figure Jumana uncovers a deep family secret, compelling her to question her Palestinian lineage. Her fragmented memories create a strong narrative thread and in his translation Hazem Jamjoum successfully captures its energy and pacing; he preserves the cultural nuances while making the language of Maya Abu Al-Hayya...

In Once Upon Argentina, Andrés Neuman reimagines the family saga as a kaleidoscope of migrations, memories, and missing voices. Translators Nick Caistor and Lorenza García render Neuman’s lyrical, layered prose with clarity and warmth. Their translation brings out the novel’s intricate structure, shifting moods, and playful wordplay. As Neuman blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, past and present, Caistor and García craft a ...

Every now and then a novel cuts through the noise and calls out the truth of the present moment. Omar Khalifah’s Sand-Catcher is that novel, and Barbara Romaine is the translator who brings his wistful story the attention it deserves. With brisk humour and a nuanced view onto the lives of the Palestinian diaspora, the novel follows the travails of four Amman-based journalists tasked with persuading an elderly survivor of the Nakba to share hi...

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue is a sumptuous novel, as innovative as it is entrancing. Ostensibly written by the Japanese protagonist Aoyama Chizuko and translated twice by her Taiwanese translator O Chizuru and by the author Yáng herself, the novel unfolds like an elaborate banquet, offering up course after course of longing, misgiving, disquiet, and resistance in nineteenth century Japanese-controlled Taiwan. From start to fini...

Joyous, irreverent, and irrepressibly funny, Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires is a raucous fictionalized retelling of the vexatious meeting between Cortés and Moctezuma on which Mexico’s fortunes have since turned. Natasha Wimmer’s skillful translation brings to life the fantastical coterie of the priests, soldiers, slaves, and family members who people the novel, as well as the presence of Nahuatl in the original Spa...

“This translation is dedicated to all translators, everywhere, at all times.” What a fitting tribute from this remarkable tour de force by Frank Wynne in rendering Mathias Énard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild—a veritable feast of a novel, which begins with an ethnographer arriving in a rural French town but soon pirouettes into a riotous Rabelaisian romp where past mixes with present, and death itself proves exuberantly fecun...

Cold Nights of Childhood does what excellent contemporary autofiction does – but it first did it, in Turkish, almost half a century ago. Tight in length, but capacious and twisting and sprawling in form, this is a daring work of personal inquiry – of depression, sex, class, paranoia, travel, family, love, death; of everything. This personal disarray witnesses political revolution but refuses to be subsumed by it. And Özlü’s daring work comes to ...

The Hunger of Women seamlessly defies literary conventions to tell the story of an unconventional narrator who holds the wisdoms of ages passed on to her through food and the female body. Castaldi, through Richards, invites us to a landscape of the everyday, to be and become with a woman who offers us “the miracle of the host.” In this feast of words and rhythms, we, addressed as Reader, find ourselves, in intimacy with a life in motion, experiencin...

Edited by Sarah Gale and Emma Raddatz

Jennifer Shyue’s first move, on a 2019 Fulbright year in Peru, was to get her hands on a legendary work of Peruvian nikkei literature she’d read about: La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu. She soon acquired many more books by Augusto Higa Oshiro, and found herself sitting in a Lima yard with him and his small dog, talking about his work. The working-class Peruvian-Japanese author sought a language “capa...

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...

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...

Open Heart is the first of Lindo’s books for adults to reach English readers. It’s a novel about survival, whether it be in post-Civil War Spain or as a girl who experiences a nomadic childhood and during adolescence loses her mother. Once open, this novel is difficult to close, and after its final page, the story, inspired by Lindo’s own parents, remains on the heart. Readers will admire the intense relationship West must have had with Lindo’s ...

In Celia in the Revolution one finds an engaging novel centered on a long-beloved character whose tales shed light on the social dynamics of the Spanish Civil War. For fans of Fortún and her long series of wartime-inspired fiction, this novel represents a culminating peek into life during this pivotal period of Spain’s history. As the author’s final work, the manuscript was completed in exile and was published posthumously in 1987 as the capstone o...

This edition presents two compelling lectures from one of the twentieth century’s most iconic literary figures, in which Lorca expounds the concepts of duende and—more broadly—literary creativity, delivered nearly a hundred years ago. In the text, Lorca’s ideas shine through to identify elements of his literary influences. This book is unique among finalists as it is neither a novel nor poetry, but a thoughtful compilation of these key lectures ...

In a striking combination of a non-traditional love story and a study of AI, Belén Gopegui offers this tale as a book-length application for work at Google. Young Mateo and not-so-young Olga write, in third person, their story in an effort to secure a job for Mateo. Gopegui stresses certain words, such as “anodyne” and “contemplate” in a study of philosophy questioning various modes of thinking in an exploration of universal que...

In a sense, Un Amor: A Novel is a rite of passage, even though the protagonist, Nat, is a young woman, older by at least a decade than the usual foci of such tales. Self-exiled into an out-of-the-way rural village, she tries to blend in with her few off-beat neighbors, with varying success. The multiple voices of the townspeople, as well as Nat’s own, are beautifully captured by translator Katie Whittemore. Nat finally moves to another small villa...

The End of August captures the tumult of almost a century of Korean history as it follows Lee Woo-cheol–a country boy who loves to run–his family, and his village from Japanese occupation to the Korean War to democratic protests to present-day Korea. Weaving stream-of-consciousness, dramaturgy, Buddhist chanting, and straightforward narration to mirror the chaos of the events, the novel is both expertly controlled and loose, focused and expansive, e...

In Not Even the Dead, one luckless man named Juan agrees to hunt down a mysterious fugitive Indian, also named Juan, through 16th-century Spanish Mexico, in a time of plague. But as Juan seeks Juan, his journey lengthens through the centuries, two weeks at a time, and evolves into an epic of religious, political, and personal transformation that may, in fact, be a lost cause. Katie Whittemore’s English captures the poetry and magic of the story wi...

Unusually for a work of gargantuan and often devastating themes, Whale is a sheer pleasure to read. Chi-Young Kim has crafted a translation with the perfect sense of wonder, buoyed by sly wit and philosophical asides, helping us swim smoothly through every twist in the plot, whether tragic or comic. This multi-layered tale of ambition and evolution puts to work elements including crime, capitalism, murder, circuses, sex, and bricks in a deceptively quic...

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...