Just in time for your last-minute holiday shopping needs (what better gift than a great book? purchase links provided for your convenience), PEN America has announced the longlist for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize for a book-length translation of prose, judged this year by Eric M. B. Becker, Lisa Hayden, Jenny Wang Medina, Denise Newman, and Lara Vergnaud. Since I like to count things these days, let me point out that the PEN Translation Prize longlist is 40% women (not enough, but could be worse, I guess). I wish I could also report on the longlist for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award, but that one, I hear, is on hiatus right now for lack of funds ?. (If you’d like to endow the award, please send me a message and I’ll introduce you to the appropriate party at PEN.) The shortlists for this and all the other 2018 PEN Awards will be published in January, and the winners will be announced at a prize ceremony on Feb. 20, 2018.
PEN Translation Prize:
The Book of Emma Reyes, Emma Reyes (Penguin)
translated from the Spanish by Daniel Alarcon
IndieBound
The Book of Whispers, Varujan Vosganian (Yale University Press)
translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth
IndieBound
A Horse Walks into a Bar, David Grossman (Vintage)
translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
IndieBound
Out in the Open, Jesus Carrasco (Riverhead Books)
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
IndieBound
The Impossible Fairy Tale, Han Yujoo (Graywolf Press)
translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
IndieBound
Affections: A Novel, Rodrigo Hasbun (Simon & Schuster)
translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
IndieBound
Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin (New York Review Books)
translated from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie
IndieBound
Bark, Georges Didi-Huberman (MIT Press)
translated from the French by Samuel Martin
IndieBound
Katalin Street, Magda Szabo (NYRB Classics)
translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix
IndieBound
Black Moses, Alain Mabanckou (The New Press)
translated from the French by Helen Stevenson
IndieBound
Congratulations to all the longlisted translators!
This particular prize is given out by PEN America, one of the two U.S.-based subsidiaries of International PEN (the other being PEN USA). Many PEN clubs in other countries offer prizes for translations into the languages of those countries. This blog really just covers literary translation matters in the United States (with some UK and Canadian news too when I hear about it, which I don’t always).
These translations are all into English. Aren’t translations into other languages eligible for the PEN prize?