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distant transit is a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

 

We’re thrilled to announce that Maja Haderlap’s distant transit is a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation! Tess Lewis translated Maja’s collected poems from German, following up the publication of her translation of Maja’s novel Angels of Oblivion. We extend our warmest congratulations to the duo for their brilliant work. The PEN Award Finalists have recognized 43 writers and 11 translators at all stages of their careers, across 11 distinct book awards. distant transit is one of five works of poetry selected for the Award for Poetry in Translation shortlist. To read more about the finalists, be sure to visit the PEN America website here. You can order distant transit from our website, here.

 

 

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Exciting nominations for distant transit and Moldy Strawberries!

We’re excited to announce that our books have been nominated for three literary awards in the past week!

Maja Haderlap’s distant transit, translated from German by Tess Lewis, has been longlisted for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award. distant transit traverses the familiar landscape of the Slovenes, rent by war and imposed borders. Haderlap’s verses, rendered in all their complexity and emotion in Lewis’s translation, are an ode to survival, building monuments to traditions and lives lost.

Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries, translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, has been longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize for book-length prose translations and for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, which supports works of high literary merit published by small presses. In eighteen stories threaded together by music and memory, Abreu reveals the Brazil of the 1980s, transformed by epidemic and military dictatorship. Lobato’s translation preserves the thrumming tension of desire and dashed hopes that haunted Abreu’s generation.

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Archipelago Books awarded by CLMP!

We’re delighted to receive a capacity-building grant from the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) this year. An inaugural award, we’re honored to have been selected alongside forty-three other small presses and magazines.

Our capacity-building grant will help us establish an events series to bring more of our international writers and translators into public high schools, community colleges, cultural centers, and libraries. Over the course of two years, the CLMP award will allow young people, educators, and readers from all walks of life to converse with literary luminaries from Peru, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan), and with translators working from Persian, Greek, Polish, Spanish, among other languages.

We’re excited for all that is ahead and can’t wait to get organizing events for our communities here in New York and beyond!

The official announcement and a full list of other grantees can be found here.

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Miljenko Jergović on the 30th anniversary of the Siege of Sarajevo

The Baffler published an extraordinary essay by Miljenko Jergović this week. First published on his blog, the essay revisits the first, uncertain days of the siege of Sarajevo, when the Bosnian Serb Army seized the heights and fired on the city for the first time. Simultaneously, Jergović was suffering from a painful toothache. “Toothache, Bleeding, Farewell,” translated from the Croatian by Mirza Purić, is a visceral, incisive reflection on the personal experience of war, thirty years later.

Jergović is the author of many books, including three published in translation by Archipelago: Sarajevo Marlboro (2004), translated by Stela Tomašević; Mama Leone (2012), translated by David Williams; Kin (2021), translated by Russell Scott Valentino; and Inshallah Madonna Inshallah (forthcoming), translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Mirza Purić.

 

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Kibogo is a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Wonderful news today! We’re delighted to announce that Scholastique Mukasonga’s Kibogo is a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Kibogo is a sharp, darkly humorous account of the clash between Rwandans and the colonizers, missionaries, and academics that attempt to suppress their autonomy and cultural inheritance. In an interview with Scholastique and Mark in Words Without Borders, Mark says that Kibogo‘s narrator “never loses her grasp of human folly and self-delusion, her sense of the absurd, or her irreverent eye . . .” You can order the book here and you can read more about this year’s finalists in the New York Times. Huge congratulations to Mark and Scholastique!

 

 

A triumph . . . Biting and gloriously satirical, Mukasonga’s novel shows how stories can wield a power that is greater than the sword, resisting ownership by any one person or power. It is a rich and hilarious work.

— Declan Fry, ABC News
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Archipelago at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Archipelago Books will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, October 2 – we’d love to see you there! You can find us all day at Booth 411, where we’ll be selling many of the wonderful books on our backlist. We’ll also be at the Center for Brooklyn History at 12 pm EST, where Scholastique Mukasonga – whose novel Kibogo was just longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award – and Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin will discuss time, myth, and community in a conversation moderated by Publishers Weekly fiction editor David Varno.

More event details can be found on the Brooklyn Book Festival website, here.

 

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Scholastique Mukasonga’s Kibogo Longlisted for the National Book Award

Scholastique Mukasonga’s Kibogo has been longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award! We’re delighted to publish this spell-binding story about myths reimagined and the absurdities of colonialism. Full of unmatched wit and irony, Kibogo was expertly translated from French by Mark Polizzotti. You can read more about the novel, and place an order here.

Our congratulations to the fellow nominees: Mohammed Hasan Alwan’s Ibn Arabi’s Small Death, Jon Fosse’s A New Name: Septology VI-VII, Shahriar Mandanipour’s Seasons of Purgatory, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses, Saša Stanišić’s Where You Come From, Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob.

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Honoring J. Patrick Lannan Jr. 1938-2022

Patrick Lannan, whose dedication to supporting the arts during his tenure as president of the Lannan Foundation from 1986 to 2021 helped us to publish so many transformative works of literature in translation here at Archipelago Books died Wednesday July 27 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

An obituary in The Santa Fe New Mexican highlights Lannan’s lifelong commitment to supporting “the writers and artists and activists who lived on the edges.”

As the writer Terry Tempest Williams writes of Lannan: “He had an elegance of mind and a fierce and tender understanding of what supporting artists and activists and Native communities meant to the soul of America.”

Bob Martin, who ran Lannan’s “Readings and Conversations” series, called him an “extraordinary man” whose work with the Santa Fe series was “transformational.”

Read the full obituary here

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Conversations between Archipelago authors and translators online!

We are so excited to share recordings of conversations between celebrated authors, translators, and creatives over the past few weeks!

Hear Archipelago author Ida Jessen, translator Martin Aitken, and Désirée Ohrbeck revisit the steps of the creative process that culminated in A POSTCARD FOR ANNIE, from Jessen’s introspection to Aitken’s approach to translation. Big thanks to Third Place Books for hosting this conversation!

Also tune in to a thought-provoking conversation between translator Phil Roughton and broadcaster Doug McIntyre as they discuss SALKA VALKA and how Nordic literature has evolved throughout history. Huge thanks to Scandinavia House for hosting this event!