Daniel Hahn plans to donate half of his winnings from the International Dublin Literary Award to fund a new prize for debut translators. José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn were recently awarded the prestigious prize for Agualusa’s groundbreaking novel, A General Theory of Oblivion.

Hahn says that the prize’s aim is to recognize “excellent debut literary prose translation published in the UK.” Antonia Lloyd-Jones, joint chair of the Translators Association, notes that Hahn’s endowment is “a ground-breaking addition to the world of literary translation.”

Read more about the the TA First Translation Prize.

José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn have won the International Dublin Literary Award for the brilliant translation of Agualusa’s novel, A General Theory of Oblivion. This is the sixth book on which Agualusa and Hahn have collaborated.

Hahn says: “My career began with Agualusa.” Over the years, the two have formed a comfortable relationship, one that Hahn says enables him to stay true to the “music, cadence and comedy” of Agualusa’s prose.

Read more about how Agualusa and Hahn plan to use their prize money to contribute to the literary community.

This year’s Jerusalem Prize for literature will be awarded to the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, who is known chiefly for My Struggle, a six-book series of autobiographical novels.

The prize is awarded every two years to a writer whose work, according to the website of the Jerusalem International Book Fair, best expresses and promotes the idea of “freedom of the individual in society.”

To read more, click here.

The Best Translated Book Awards have announced their finalists for fiction and poetry, and Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation of Abdellatif Laâbi’s In Praise of Defeat: Selected Poems has been shortlisted! The BTBA, founded by Three Percent, aim to bring attention to the best original works of international fiction and published in the U.S. during the previous year. For each award, a $5,000 dollar prize is given to the books author(s) and translator(s). The finalists were chosen by a panel of five judges.

 

The winners will be announced on Thursday, May 4th at 7 p.m., simultaneously on The Millions and at a live event at The Folly (92 W. Houston Street, New York City). The event is free and open to the public.

 

Read more about the finalists here.

–FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE–

 

New York City, New York, March 14, 2017—Jill Schoolman, founder and publisher of Archipelago Books, will be the recipient of the 2017 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, Words Without Borders announced today.

Throughout her career as an editor and publisher, Schoolman has been a leading voice for the promotion of international literature. In 2003, she founded Archipelago Books with the mission to publish essential foreign-language texts in outstanding English translations. The list of international writers she has published includes such luminaries as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elias Khoury, Scholastique Mukasonga, Miljenko Jergovic, Julio Cortázar, Antonio Tabucchi, Magdalena Tulli, and Wiesław Myśliwski.

“As physical and political borders close in around us, Jill Schoolman’s Archipelago Books offers a safe harbor to literary talent from around the world, infusing our bookshelves with vital and original work in translation,” said Words Without Borders Board Chair Samantha Schnee. “We are thrilled to celebrate her heroic efforts with this year’s Ottaway Award.”

The Ottaway Award will be presented to Ms. Schoolman at the annual Words Without Borders gala on November 1, 2017, in New York City.

Named in honor of the first chair of Words Without Borders, James H. Ottaway, Jr., the annual award recognizes an individual whose work and activism have supported WWB’s mission of promoting cultural understanding through the publication and promotion of international literature. Past awardees include the renowned editor Drenka Willen, the late editor and translator Carol Brown Janeway, and accomplished publishers Sara Bershtel and Barbara Epler.

The 2017 Words Without Borders gala will be held at Tribeca Three Sixty in New York City on November 1, 2017. For more information about the event or to sponsor a table, please contact giving@wordswithoutborders.org.

Words Without Borders
Founded in 2003, Words Without Borders is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering global understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature. To date WWB has published over 2,200 pieces of literature by writers from 132 countries, translated from 112 languages. Our publications and programs open doors for readers of English around the world to the multiplicity of viewpoints, richness of experience, and literary perspective on world events offered by writers in other languages. We seek to connect international literary writers to the general public, to students and educators, and to print and other media and to serve as a primary online location for a global literary conversation.

For additional information, please contact:
Contact: Savannah Whiting, Communications Coordinator
Organization Name: Words Without Borders
Telephone Number: (603) 630-7533
Email Address: press@wordswithoutborders.org
Website Address: www.wordswithoutborders.org
Twitter: @wwborders

Breyte Breytenbach, a South African poet, writer and artist who opposed apartheid and was a political prisoner for many years, has been awarded the 2017 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award is a global literary honor, largely in the field of poetry, granted annually for outstanding artistic and intellectual achievements linked to the ideas that prevailed throughout the output of Polish writer, poet and moralist Zbigniew Herbert.

The judges, a panel consisting of international poets, writers and essayists, stressed that Breytenbach’s oeuvre recalls Herbert’s words: “Let the anger of the powerless be like the sea / whenever you hear the voice of the humiliated and beaten.”

Breytenbach accepted the award, saying, “I am profoundly humbled by this recognition and accept it with the knowledge that it carries the name of a brave and wise poet and essayist. I hope I can live up to the example he gave us, particularly in this very dark season of anger and disarray. I am proud to be among those who believe that there is, in each of us, a part of humanity and a strive for values worth fighting for – in the example of and inspired by Herbert.”

To read more about the Zbigniew Herbert International Award and Breyten Breytenbach, click here.

 

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) has revealed the long list of 16 novels in contention for the 2017 prize, including among others Elias Khoury with his new novel The Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam. The novels selected were chosen from 186 entries from 19 countries, all published within the last 12 months. Each of the six shortlisted finalists receives U$ 10,000, with a further U$ 50,000 going to the winner. The longlist was chosen by a panel of five judges chaired by Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifa.

Link below:

http://www.arabicfiction.org/en/longlist-announcement-2017

 

Homero Aridjis, poet, environmentalist and author of The Child Poet, proposes a border of solar panels between the U.S. and Mexican border as a symbol of unity in the battle against climate change and against Donald Trump’s xenophobic initiatives.

” President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Mexico to build a wall between our countries. There is indeed a way that Mexico could create a barrier between the U.S. and Mexico, one constructed exclusively on the Mexican side, with substantial benefits for both countries and the planet: a solar border.”

You can read the full article on Huffington Post here.

Co-authored with James Ramey.

     

 

 

 

 

 

Both Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, and The Child Poet by Homero Aridjis and translated from the Spanish by Chloe Aridjis, have been named to a Best of 2016 list by The Irish Times.

Literary correspondent Eileen Battersby writes about Cockroaches that it’s “[b]eautifully written in graceful, lilting prose” but is also “harrowing reading, made all the more shocking by the way life later went on, as if the genocide had never happened. Mukasonga’s life remains dominated by her ghosts.”

Of The Child Poet, she writes that it is a “[g]lorious memoir explaining how a childhood accident created a major Mexican writer.”

 

You can read the rest of the list here.