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Announcement: A Matching Grant From Lannan Foundation!

We are excited to announce that Lannan Foundation has come forward to offer Archipelago Books a matching challenge grant of up to $25,000. If we can raise the full amount by June 1st, your contribution will be matched dollar for dollar.

Support now and your contribution will be doubled!

We believe, and Lannan agrees, that literature can change the world. We are doing what we can to find perceptive, courageous, and imaginative voices from around the world, and bring them to English-language readers in outstanding translations. The larger community around our small staff makes what we do possible.

We urge you to contribute what you can before June 1st to meet Lannan’s matching challenge grant.

As cultural budgets are slashed across the board, it is necessary for us to seek a larger portion of our support from individual donors like you. In our first 15 years, we have published more than 170 classic and contemporary works from more than 35 languages. Every donation helps us continue publishing essential books. Thank you for being a part of our efforts, and our future.

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Maja Haderlap Awarded Max Frisch Prize of the City of Zurich

Maja Haderlap, author of Angel of Oblivion, was awarded the Max Frisch Prize, given every four years by the city of Zurich to an author whose work addresses fundamental issues of democratic society in an artistically uncompromising way. The jury praised her poetry and prose that combines lyric brilliance with political incisiveness: “In a time when many places in Europe are once again engaging in identity politics, where people, cultures, and languages are being divided, Maja Haderlap’s work stands for a literature that defies borders. Behind each word her poetry discovers another, behind every silence she exposes a lament, and behind every secret, an act.”

Learn more about the prize and about Maja Haderlap’s work here.

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The Political Power of Translation

“It goes without saying that literary translation, too, is a deeply political act, one that makes particular texts accessible to particular readers by transporting them across linguistic boundaries.”

Read more of translator Chenxin Jiang’s essay on translation, politics, and the European refugee crisis in LitHub.

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Bachtyar Ali wins 2017 Nelly Sachs Prize

bachtyar-ali

Bachtyar Ali has been awarded the prestigious Nelly Sachs Prize, consisting of 15,000 Euro. The prize has been granted biennially since 1961. Former laureates include Elias Canetti, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, David Grossman, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Marie NDiaye.

Ali’s novel, The Last Pomegranate, translated from Kurdish (Sorani) by Kareem Abdulrahman, is forthcoming from Archipelago Books in 2019.

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Distant Light shortlisted for the Italian Prose in Translation Prize

Distant Light, by Antonio Moresco, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, has made the shortlist for the 2017 Italian Prose in Translation Prize (IPTA)!

 

“Despite its fable-like structure and brevity, Moresco has Kafka’s power to unnerve, and Walser’s genial strangeness. Something like a supernatural modernist story, Distant Light’s real territory is dreams, where readers may find the book’s imagery still lingering.”— Publishers Weekly

 

Founded in 2015, the IPTA recognizes the importance of contemporary Italian prose and promotes the translation of Italian works into English. To see the full shortlist, click here.