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

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

We’re delighted to share an interview with Scholastique  Mukasonga and Mark Polizzotti published by Words Without Borders. They discuss how Kibogo, a nominee for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, came into the world, as well as the intricacies of its translation into English.

 

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.

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.