Six titles have been shortlisted for the third annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. The 2019 prize is once again being judged by
· Amanda Hopkinson, Co-Director of Warwick Translates Summer School
· Boyd Tonkin, Special Adviser to the Man Booker International Prize, 2016-19
· Susan Bassnett, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick
The £1000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women's voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. Last year the prize was awarded to the novel Belladonna (Maclehose Press), written by the late Daša Drndić and translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. The inaugural prize was awarded to Memoirs of a Polar Bear (Portobello Books, 2017), written by Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada and translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.
Among the shortlistees this year is Olga Tokarczuk, who was recently announced as the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tokarczuk is on the shortlist with literary crime novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Translator Lloyd-Jones appears on the longlist for the third year running.
The 2019 competition received a total of 92 eligible entries of which 13 titles made the initial longlist. The 6 shortlisted titles include 4 novels, one collection of poetry and a memoir. Five source languages are represented: Farsi, French, Hungarian, Polish and Spanish (Argentina); two of the shortlisted writers have Iranian roots. Independent publishers such as And Other Stories and Fitzcarraldo are once again strongly represented.
titles have been shortlisted for the third annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. The 2019 prize is once again being judged by
· Amanda Hopkinson, Co-Director of Warwick Translates Summer School
· Boyd Tonkin, Special Adviser to the Man Booker International Prize, 2016-19
· Susan Bassnett, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick
The £1000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women's voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. Last year the prize was awarded to the novel Belladonna (Maclehose Press), written by the late Daša Drndić and translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. The inaugural prize was awarded to Memoirs of a Polar Bear (Portobello Books, 2017), written by Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada and translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.
Among the shortlistees this year is Olga Tokarczuk, who was recently announced as the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tokarczuk is on the shortlist with literary crime novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Translator Lloyd-Jones appears on the longlist for the third year running.
The 2019 competition received a total of 92 eligible entries of which 13 titles made the initial longlist. The 6 shortlisted titles include 4 novels, one collection of poetry and a memoir. Five source languages are represented: Farsi, French, Hungarian, Polish and Spanish (Argentina); two of the shortlisted writers have Iranian roots. Independent publishers such as And Other Stories and Fitzcarraldo are once again strongly represented.
Judge Amanda Hopkinson comments: "This year our list contains titles that reflect on wars and displacement, change and adaptation. Memoir becomes more than memories in numerous personalised – and intermittently fictionalised – recollections. Boundaries of genre are blended and reshaped, for this shortlist well illustrates how memory does not recall chronologically, nor does it conform to historical norms."
Prize coordinator, Dr Chantal Wright of the University of Warwick's School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, comments: "There was a significant degree of harmony between the judges' individual shortlists this year. We are thrilled to have Nobel Laureate Olga Tocarczuk on the shortlist for the second year running and to see translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, a tireless advocate of Polish literature in the UK, on the list for the third time. Linguistically, the list appears to be dominated by European languages but this belies the fact that, culturally, our six titles range from France to Eastern Europe to South America and the Middle East."
