The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has announced the seven titles on the shortlist for their fourth annual award. One title translated from the Arabic in on the list: Rania Mamoun’s Thirteen Months of Sunrise, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette:
Organizers said, in a prepared statement, that the seven-book shortlist “reflects the diversity of the record number of entries submitted to the prize in 2020.”
The £1000 prize, set up in 2017, has in the past leaned toward titles in European languages. However, this year, there are two books translated from Chinese (Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, translated by Natascha Bruce and White Horse by Yan Ge, translated by Nicky Harman) in addition to Rania Mamoun’s short-story collection, translated from Arabic.
The four other books on the shortlist were translated from German, Italian, Hungarian, and Swedish.
The 2020 prize is being judged by Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett, and Tonkin said, in a prepared statement:
Selected from a record entry, this outstanding shortlist not only takes readers on an epic journey across cultures from Finland to Sudan, and from Malaysia to Georgia. It honours a wide span of genres, from a young-adult novella to a multi-generational saga; from letters to short stories. Each book boasts a powerfully distinctive voice given fresh life in English thanks to a first-rate translation. Notably, this year’s shortlist also features previously untranslated work by three classic 20th-century authors: a reminder of the wealth of global women’s writing, past as well as present, that remains to be discovered by English-language readers.
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).
The complete shortlist:
Abigail by Magda Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix (MacLehose Press, 2020)
Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor (Daunt Books Publishing, 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)
The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili, translated from German by Charlotte Collins & Ruth Martin (Scribe UK, 2019)
Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette (Comma Press, 2019)
White Horse by Yan Ge, translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman (HopeRoad Publishing, 2019)
Also:
A Talk about Sudanese Short Stories and ‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’
Literary Playlist: Rania Mamoun’s ‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’
An Translated Excerpt from Rania Mamoun’s PEN-support-winning ‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’
An Ever-so-short History of the ‘Complex, Capacious’ Sudanese Short Story
