Translation from Uyghur and Arabic Makes PEN Poetry Award Longlist

Yesterday, PEN announced the longlists for their two translation prizes — poetry and prose — and Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Furthest Exile, co-translated by the author and Jeffrey Yang, made the poetry longlist:

Uyghurland collects over two decades of Ahmatjan Osman’s poetry, written both in Uyghur and in Arabic, which the poet developed while studying and living in Syria. According to the publisher, Phoneme:

Osman, the foremost Uyghur poet of his generation, channels his ancestors alongside Mallarmé and Rimbaud, observing the world from exile. Born in 1964, Osman grew up in Urumchi, the capital and the largest city of East Turkistan. In 1982 Osman became one of the first Uyghur students to study abroad after the end of the Cultural Revolution, spending several years at Damascus University in Syria studying Arabic literature. He later returned to China where he struggled to find work because of “security issues” with the Chinese government, then immigrated to Syria to work as a journalist before he was deported under pressure from the Chinese government, settling in Canada as a political refugee, where he now lives with his wife and two daughters. Uyghurland is the first-ever collection of poetry to be translated from the Uyghur language into English.

The poetry prize has just a single judge, Urayoán Noel. The full longlist:

The Country of Planks by Raúl Zurita (Action Books), translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky

Oxen Rage by Juan Gelman (co-im-press), translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford

The School of Solitude: Collected Poems by Luis Hernández (Swan Isle Press), translated from the Spanish by Anthony Geist

The Late Poems of Wang An-shih (New Directions), translated from the Chinese by David Hinton

Twelve Stations by Tomasz Różycki (Zephyr Press), translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston

Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas (Phoneme Media) translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan

I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu

Silvina Ocampo (New York Review Books Poets), translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss

Uyghurland, the Furthest Exile by Ahmatjan Osman (Phoneme Media), translated from the Uyghur and Arabic by Jeffrey Yang with the author

The fiction longlist — judged in part by Arabic-English translator Elisabeth Jaquette — includes the amazing Sphinx by Anne Garréta, amazingly translated by Emma Ramadan. The full fiction longlist:

The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company), translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions), translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson

The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell

Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah (AmazonCrossing), translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

The Game for Real by Richard Weiner (Two Lines Press), translated from the Czech by Benjamin Paloff

Sphinx by Anne Garréta (Deep Vellum Publishing), translated from the French by Emma Ramadan

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Penguin Classic), translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready

The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov (Open Letter Books), translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar

Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano (Yale University Press/Margellos World Republic of Letters),
translated from the French by Phoebe Weston-Evans

All the longlists can be found at the PEN website.