Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.
For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Moving the Palace, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose:
Moving the Palace
by Charif Majdalani
translated from the French by Edward Gauvin
(New Vessel Press)
In lush, sensuous prose, Majdalani has written a picaresque adventure set in the Middle East and North Africa. At the dawn of the 20th century, the young Samuel Ayyad leaves his home in Lebanon to make his fortune in Sudan, “the most thankless land known at the time.” But the region offers unparalleled opportunity for a young Lebanese man who is “Westernized, Anglophone, and Protestant to boot,” in other words, able to navigate the many factions among the rulers and ruled. This novel is an imaginative and incisive retelling of colonial history, in which no side escapes the sting of the pen.