SEPTEMBER 10, 2024 — Three of the works longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature are literary works translated from Arabic. This year’s 10-book longlist was announced today.
Leri Price is now a frequent National Book Award contender: This year, she’s on the longlist for her translation of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. She and Yazbek were also shortlisted in 2021 for Planet of Clay, and Price has been both longlisted (2023, No One Prayed Over Their Graves) and shortlisted (2019, Death Is Hard Work) for her translations of work by Khaled Khalifa.
Of the book, NBA organizers write:
In Where the Wind Calls Home, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, a wounded 19-year-old soldier, Ali, is fighting to survive in the Syrian Civil War. Blurring timelines to mirror Ali’s disorientated state, Samar Yazbek recounts the history of a country’s cultural richness and religious traditions through vivid hallucinations, remembrances, and a chilling reminder of the painful realities of war.
Also on the longlist is Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. In the press release, the NBA writes that the book is:
Set in a dystopian future headed by an all-powerful government, Bothayna Al-Essa’s unnamed narrator is hired as a book censor and tasked with identifying books not fit for publication—those that depict queerness, religion, education, and democracy. Concerned that his daughter’s love for stories will put her in danger, the book censor joins an underground organization of clandestine booksellers and undercover librarians, and develops a love for reading that fuels his mission to preserve history in The Book Censor’s Library, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain.
The third on the list is Nasser Abu Srour’s The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom, translated by Luke Leafgren, about which they write:
Nasser Abu Srour’s poetic memoir, The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom, depicts more than three decades spent in Israeli prisons, where Abu Srour is serving a life sentence without parole. Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, Abu Srour shares how, during prolonged periods of solitary confinement, he turned to his imagination as a strategy for survival in this rumination on love, justice, and the far-reaching power of hope.
The shortlist in this category, as well as four others, will be announced on October 1, while the will be announced live at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 20, 2024.
The complete longlist can be found at the National Book Award website.