We are delighted to announce that José Eduardo Agualusa has won the 2021 Portuguese PEN Prize for his novel, Os Vivos e os Outros (The Living and the Rest)! Archipelago is slated to publish the English translation of The Living and the Rest in the coming years.
Agualusa is an Angolan journalist and author of Portuguese and Brazilian descent who writes primarily in his native Portuguese. His books have been translated into over 30 languages. Archipelago has had the privilege of publishing two of Agualusa’s books, A General Theory of Oblivion (2015) and The Society of Reluctant Dreamers (2020), both of which were masterfully translated into English by Daniel Hahn.
Agualusa’s 1997 novel, Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, and he received the U.K.’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Book of Chameleons in 2007. A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and later won the 2017 Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, Agualusa received Angola’s most prestigious literary prize, the National Prize for Culture and Arts.
Malcolm Forbes calls A General Theory of Oblivion “a powerful examination of personal recollection and public upheaval, and a penetrating study of isolation and the cost of freedom.”
Of The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Publishers Weekly writes, “False memories and clairvoyant dreams combine in Agualusa’s sweeping, intricately plotted tale of personal and political history in Angola . . . While the dense and tangled story, rife with diary entries, recounted personal histories, and thinly drawn tertiary characters, is almost too short for its own good, Agualusa manages to pull off a deeply satisfying ending . . . (a) populous, multilayered commentary on the fogs of love and war.”
Read more here.