The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize has just announced its 2024 shortlist, and we’re delighted to announce that two Archipelago releases made the list!

Warmest congratulations to Scholastique Mukasonga and translator Mark Polizzotti, whose Kibogo (out in the UK with Daunt Books) was included in the shortlist.

And congratulations as well to José Eduardo Agualusa and translator Daniel Hahn! We’re excited to reveal that their nominated work The Living and the Rest (out in the UK with MacLehose Press) will be published by Archipelago in Spring 2025.

Archipelago has already published Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, and A Practical Guide to Levitation, all brilliantly translated by Hahn. We have also published four other titles by Mukasonga, with her latest, Sister Deborah, slated for publication in October.

 

 

Praise for Kibogo:

Mukasonga’s most accomplished novel . . . Kibogo is a parable about the power of folklore and the dangers of forgetting. (Mukasonga plays with the tension between oral histories and her role in transcribing them.) . . . Her books offer a way for younger Rwandans to rediscover their own culture through myths and stories that have largely been forgotten.

— Kevin Okoth, The London Review of Books

The power of storytelling and the power of women is a constant amidst the stunning imagery and cutting anti-colonial critique of this collection, translated insightfully by Mark Polizotti. An immense achievement.

— Pierce Alquist, Book Riot

 

 

Praise for José Eduardo Agualusa:

Cross J.M. Coetzee with Gabriel García Márquez and you’ve got José Eduardo Agualusa, Portugal’s next candidate for the Nobel Prize.

— Alan Kaufman, author of Matches

Agualusa’s prose, as translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese, is wry and lucid and weird . . . Read if you like: Roberto Bolaño, the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, Phil Klay, traveling alone, the simulation hypothesis.

— Molly Young, New York Times Book Review