It’s been such a pleasure serving on the jury for the brand-new National Book Award for Translated Literature. It meant that I spent the summer reading lots and lots of beautiful translated books – lots and lots and lots of them – and I really enjoyed being professionally obliged to make time to do so much reading, something I hadn’t done in many years. It was incredibly difficult for the jury (which also included Harold Augenbraum, Sinan Antoon, Karen Maeda Allman, and Álvaro Enrigue) to pick just 10 of these books, but that was our job, and in the end we did it, and the National Book Foundation has just announced the list of semifinalists on the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. I’m just delighted with this longlist. Soon we’ll have to start talking about a shortlist, which will be even harder, but for now, please feast your eyes on this beautiful longlist of translated books:
Négar Djavadi, Disoriental, translated by Tina Kover (Europa Editions)
Roque Larraquy, Comemadre, translated by Heather Cleary (Coffee House Press)
Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, translated by Max Weiss and Dunya Mikhail (New Directions Publishing)
Perumal Murugan, One Part Woman, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Black Cat / Grove Atlantic)
Hanne Ørstavik, Love, translated by Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books)
Gunnhild Øyehaug, Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life, translated by Kari Dickson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers)
Domenico Starnone, Trick, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions)
Yoko Tawada, The Emissary, translated by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions Publishing)
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House)
Tatyana Tolstaya, Aetherial Worlds, translated by Anya Migdal (Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random House)
The shortlist will be announced on October 10. Maybe you’ll have read all these delicious books by then? Congratulations to all the longlisted translators!