Author: Madeleine Johar Nephew

Posted on by

Kibogo is a finalist for the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize

We are excited to share that Mark Polizzotti‘s translation of Kibogo, our latest from the brilliant writer and thinker Scholastique Mukasonga, is a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize! The Prize, introduced this year, celebrates the artistic merit of literature in translation in any genre. Kibogo is a satirical inquiry into Rwanda’s colonial history and the imposition of Catholicism on Rwandan people, exploring unexpected syncretisms and the endurance of tradition in a hillside village. Last fall, Kibogo was also shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Congratulations again to Scholastique and Mark! You can find the full list of 2022 NBCC finalists here.

 

Official dogma is no match for the mercurial power of storytelling in Rwandan-French writer Scholastique Mukasonga’s sly new novel Kibogo . . . Mischievous and satirical . . . The stories themselves are furtively retold and altered and added to across time, subsuming even their tellers as they demonstrate a life force and lifespan that mere mortals can’t compete with.

— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.