For those of us stateside, this would have been a great night to be at the Warwick Arts Centre where the winner of the second annual Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has just been announced. Imagine raising a glass with all your colleagues to celebrate the year’s most beautiful books by women authors in prize-winning translations! There was an unsurprisingly robust shortlist this year (I was proud to be on it), and the winning book, as was just announced moments ago, is Belladonna by Daša Drndić, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. Belladonna is the third novel to appear in English by Drndić, who passed away in June. The book was published by MacLehose Press in the UK, New Directions in the U.S.
An honorable mention was given to Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft. Big congratulations to the prizewinning translators (and of course Tokarczuk); may they make many more beautiful books for us to read!