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Find The New Yorker’s announcement here.
The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 1 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
The ten titles on this year’s Translated Literature Longlist were originally published in six different languages: Arabic, Danish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Swedish. Four honorees have previously been recognized as Longlisters or Finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Leri Price and Samar Yazbek were Finalists in 2021 for Planet of Clay, and, for her translations, Price was Longlisted in 2023 for No One Prayed Over Their Graves and a Finalist in 2019 for Death Is Hard Work, both written by Khaled Khalifa. Sophie Hughes was Longlisted for her translations in 2020 for Hurricane Season and in 2023 for This Is Not Miami, both written by Fernanda Melchor. Heather Cleary was Longlisted in 2018 for her translation of Comemadre by Roque Larraquy. The authors and translators on the list have been recognized by numerous international prizes, including the English PEN Translates Awards, the International Booker Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, among others.
Two debut titles on this year’s list interrogate class divides and the confines of place, from Spain to South America. A grandmother and granddaughter are haunted by the vicious ghosts, shadows, and skeletons that roam within their cursed house. When a young boy goes missing, the neighbors suspect the duo is behind his mysterious disappearance in Layla Martinez’s debut novel. Woodworm, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, offers an exploration of classism, inherited trauma, and the search for revenge and justice in an inhospitable world. In Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, an unnamed woman grapples with the resentment she feels towards her overbearing mother, the ex-husband she’s still in love with, and the boy she babysits whose insatiable hunger demands round-the-clock care. All the while, a devastating plague ravages the city’s food supply, forcing residents to consume an affordable but nauseating pink slime produced by a local meat-processing plant in this harrowing debut novel translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary.
Three of this year’s Longlisted titles consider how acts of violence, health crises, and political turmoil can distort the memories of individuals, society, and history. Fernando Vallejo’s queer autofiction novel, The Abyss, follows a middle-aged man on a visit to Medellín, Colombia where his brother is dying of AIDS. Together, the brothers reflect on their youth and country in this poignant exploration of memory and mortality, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert. 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. 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.
In two of this year’s titles, characters traverse countries in search of answers, informed both by historical contexts and present-day ramifications. Yáng Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue follows a fictional Japanese writer and her relationship with the charming yet closed-off Taiwanese woman who serves as her interpreter. Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, this novel explores language, politics, and popular culture in 1930s Taiwan, and the shape a cross-cultural friendship takes under the weight of history. Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, is an epic that relates the experiences of two Indigenous Sámi families over the course of three generations and one hundred years. Ædnan—a Northern Sámi word that translates to land, ground, or earth, and echoes of mother—weaves together a tale of displacement, cultural erasure, and resistance in the face of colonial oppression.
Three novels bring satire and disorienting realities to the Translated Literature Longlist. In The Villain’s Dance, translated from the French by Roland Glasser, readers zig-zag across timelines, perspectives, and borders—from 1990s Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) to the diamond mines of Angola. Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel features a dizzying cast of characters whose quests for survival amidst political, environmental, and financial uncertainty somehow, ultimately, converge. 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. When readers are introduced to Tara Selter, the protagonist of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), she is stuck in a time loop and reluctantly accepting her new reality as she realizes that she has relived November 18th for the 122nd time. Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, this novel is the first in a seven-volume series about existential loneliness, the revelations found in repetition, and how to find your way back into a shared timeline with those you love.
Publishers submitted a total of 141 books for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The judges for Translated Literature are Aron Aji, Jennifer Croft, Jhumpa Lahiri (Chair), Gary Lovely, and Julia Sanches. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. For more information about the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the broadcast, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
Nasser Abu Srour, The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom
Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren
Other Press
Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor’s Library
Translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain
Restless Books
Linnea Axelsson, Ædnan
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)
Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
New Directions Publishing
Layla Martínez, Woodworm
Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott
Two Lines Press
Fiston Mwanza Mujila, The Villain’s Dance
Translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Deep Vellum / Deep Vellum Publishing
Fernanda Trías, Pink Slime
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary
Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Fernando Vallejo, The Abyss
Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert
New Directions Publishing
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Graywolf Press
Samar Yazbek, Where the Wind Calls Home
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
World Editions
