HUGE congratulations to Bianca Bellová and Alex Zucker for making the longlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation!
16 titles have been longlisted for the seventh annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
The £1000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. The prize is judged by Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett.
In 2022, the prize was jointly awarded to Osebol by Marit Kapla, translated from Swedish by Peter Graves and published by Allen Lane/Penguin Random House, and to Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell and published by Tilted Axis Press.
The 2023 competition received a total of 153 eligible entries representing 32 languages; this is the largest number of submissions made to the prize to date. The longlist covers 11 languages and for the first time includes a title translated from Vietnamese. Arabic, Chinese, Hungarian and Italian are represented more than once. The longlist includes titles from 13 publishers, with the independent publishers Dedalus, Jantar and Parthian Press featuring for the first time.
The judges said of the 2023 longlist:
'From an exceptionally rich field of submissions we have chosen 16 remarkable books in first-rate translations. All of them deserve to find delighted readers everywhere. Our contemporary picks span a dazzling rainbow of genres, cultures and voices – from an Egyptian graphic novel to a Vietnamese vision of migrant life in France; a Chinese fable of an alternative Hong Kong to a comic-epic Swedish novel of ideas; a Mexican musical elegy to a Yemeni documentary testament to the human costs of war. But this year’s long list also honours a formidable cache of rediscovered gems from major 20th-century women writers: classic works given new life by the translator’s time-defying art.'
The shortlist for the prize will be published in early November. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at The Shard in London on Thursday 23 November.
The full list of longlisted titles, in alphabetical order, is as follows:
- Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight (Pushkin Press)
- Lalla Romano, A Silence Shared, translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore (Pushkin Press)
- Amanda Svensson, A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley (Scribe UK)
- Krisztina Tóth, Barcode, translated from Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (Jantar)
- Thuận, Chinatown, translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý (Tilted Axis)
- Zhang Yueran, Cocoon, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions)
- Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Pushkin Press)
- Dorothy Tse, Owlish, translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce (Fitzcarraldo)
- Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life, translated from French by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (Bloomsbury)
- Magda Szabó, The Fawn, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix (Maclehose)
- Bianca Bellová, The Lake, translated from Czech by Alex Zucker (Parthian Books)
- Grazia Deledda, The Queen of Darkness, translated from Italian by Graham Anderson (Dedalus)
- Margo Glantz, The Remains, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones (Charco Press)
- Hanne Ørstavik, ti amo, translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken (And Other Stories)
- Bushra al-Maqtari, What Have You Left Behind? translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain (Fitzcarraldo)
- Deena Mohamed, Your Wish Is My Command, translated from Arabic by Deena Mohamed (Granta)
The prize is generously supported in 2023 by the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures and the Warwick Institute of Engagement at the University of Warwick, the British Centre for Literary Translation, and the British Comparative Literary Association.
The Lake is a truly fantastic novel, a dystopian page-turner, and it really deserves all of the accolades it's getting! Earlier in the year The Lake won the EBRD Literature Prize:
'The Lake is a bewitching, beguiling, terrifying and shocking portal into a world gone wrong, a realm in which tenderness and courage come up against brutality and indifference, in which fellow-feeling and communality are undercut by self-interest and folly – and in which small gestures nonetheless keep the flame of hope alive. It is utterly propulsive, immersive and unique, and deserves to become a European classic, to be read by many generations to come.' – Toby Lichtig, EBRD Literature Prize judge
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