‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’ Makes Longlist for 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation

The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has announced the 16 titles longlisted for their fourth annual award. One title translated from the Arabic made the list: Rania Mamoun’s Thirteen Months of Sunrise, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette.

The £1000 literary prize was set up in 2017 with the aim of addressing the gender imbalance in translated literature, specifically for a British and Irish readership.

Judges for the 2020 prize are: Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin, and Susan Bassnett.

According to prize organizers, the 2020 competition received a total of 132 eligible entries translated from 34 source languages. This was a marked increase on the number of entries received in previous years: 2017 (58 entries), 2018 (52 entries), and 2019 (92 entries). 

As in previous years, most of the titles are translated from European languages, but there are also two books translated from Chinese and one from Arabic.

Judges said, in a prepared release:

This year saw the biggest number of books entered, over twice that of 2017 when the prize began. As this unique Prize has grown, so has the scope and range of the writing by women around the world that it salutes.

This year’s longlist not only takes us from Sudan to Malaysia, and from Finland to Brazil. It is the most genre-bending longlist to date, encompassing lyric poetry and children’s fiction, crime writing and gastronomic memoir, an epistolary novel and a collection of letters, as well as the historical epic and the short story. On this occasion, the judges’ choices also showcase an outstanding group of previously untranslated works by great women writers of the twentieth century.

The shortlist for the prize is set to be published in early November, with a winner announced in an online ceremony on Thursday, November 26. 

The complete longlist:

Abigail by Magda Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix (MacLehose Press, 2020)

Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from Danish by Michael Favala Goldman (Penguin Classics, 2019)

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor (Daunt Books Publishing, 2019)

Isabella by Isabella Morra, translated from Italian by Caroline Maldonado (Smokestack Books, 2019)

Lake Like a Mirror by Sok Fong Ho, translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce (Granta Publications, 2019)

Letters from Tove by Tove Jansson, edited by Boel Westin & Helen Svensson, translated from Swedish by Sarah Death (Sort of Books, 2019)

Pixel by Krisztina Toth, translated from Hungarian by Owen Good (Seagull Books, 2019)

Summer of Reckoning by Marion Brunet, translated from French by Katherine Gregor (Bitter Lemon Press, 2020)

The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Iona Macintyre & Fiona Mackintosh (Charco Press, 2019)

The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector, translated from Portuguese by Benjamin Moser & Magdalena Edwards (Penguin Modern Classics, 2019)

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili, translated from German by Charlotte Collins & Ruth Martin (Scribe UK, 2019)

The Way Through the Woods by Long Litt Woon, translated from Norwegian by Barbara Haveland (Scribe UK, 2019)

Things that Fall from the Sky by Selja Ahava, translated from Finnish by Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah (Oneworld, 2019)

Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette (Comma Press, 2019)

Vivian by Christina Hesselholdt, translated from Danish by Paul Russell Garrett (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019)

White Horse by Yan Ge, translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman (HopeRoad Publishing, 2019)