Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Olga Tokarczuk, and Yoko Ogawa are among the finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards.
The shortlists for the prizes, which are given annually in fiction and poetry, were announced on Monday at The Millions. The awards were founded by the University of Rochester’s Three Percent website.
Nobel laureate Tokarczuk made the shortlist for her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Ogawa’s The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder, and Del Amo’s Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne, also made the cut.
Other finalists in the fiction category include; Daša Drndić’s EEG, translated by Celia Hawkesworth; Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, translated by Geraldine Harcourt.
In poetry, finalists include Shimon Adaf for Aviva-No, translated by Yael Segalovitz; Etal Adnan for Time, translated by Sarah Riggs; and Amanda Berenguer for Materia Prima, credited to eight different translators.
The Best Translated Book Awards were established in 2008. Past winners have included Tove Jansson for The True Deceiver, translated by Thomas Teal; Can Xue for The Last Lover, translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen; and Patrick Chamoiseau for Slave Old Man, translated by Linda Coverdale.
The winners of this year’s awards will be announced on May 27.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
