Celestial Bodies, written by Jokha Alharthi and translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.
The prize awards £50,000 to the best works of translated fiction from around the world, with prize money split evenly between translator and author. Alkharthi is the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, and the first author from the Arabian Gulf to win the Man Booker International.
Bettany Hughes, who chaired the panel of five judges, said of the novel, “Its delicate artistry draws us into a richly imagined community—opening out to tackle profound questions of time and mortality and disturbing aspects of our shared history. The style is a metaphor for the subject, subtly resisting clichés of race, slavery and gender. The translation is precise and lyrical, weaving in the cadences of both poetry and everyday speech.Celestial Bodies evokes the forces that constrain us and those that set us free.”
‘Celestial Bodies’ Wins the Man Booker International Prize
The 2015 Pulitzer for Fiction Goes to Anthony Doerr’s ‘All the Light We Cannot See’
Following last year’s win for Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, the Pulitzer jury named Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See this year’s winner in the fiction category, a second year in a row that the year’s break-out literary bestseller took home the prize.
Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with bonus links:
Fiction:
Winner: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (A World Made of Words: On Anthony Doerr’s Nouns and Verbs, Doerr’s Year in Reading 2010 and 2014)
Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford (Tossed on Life’s Tide: Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank with You)
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami (Ship of Fools: On Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account)
Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates
General Nonfiction:
Winner: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (Extinction Stories: The Ecological True-Crime Genre)
No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
History:
Winner: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth Fenn
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker
Biography:
Winner: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer
Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism by Thomas Brothers
Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin
Poetry:
Winner: Digest by Gregory Pardlo
Reel to Reel by Alan Shapiro
Compass Rose by Arthur Sze
Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.
National Book Critics Circle Finalists Announced
The finalists for the annual NBCC award are now out. The fiction list pairs a couple of less buzzed about books with three that have already received either award love or copious amounts of ink in the book pages and on blogs. Here are the finalists for fiction and non-fiction with excerpts and other links where available. As a side note, the NBCC award is particularly interesting in that it is the only major award that pits American books against British ones.FictionVikram Chandra, Sacred Games (excerpt, Garth’s review)Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (excerpt, Edan’s review)Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men (excerpt, Booker shortlisted)Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter (excerpt)Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (excerpt, a Millions most anticipated book)NonfictionPhilip Gura, American Transcendentalism (excerpt)Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (New Yorker review)Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (excerpt)Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (excerpt, NBA Winner)Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (excerpt)
For more on the NBCC Awards and the finalists in the other categories, check out the NBCC’s blog.
Award Season
Now that Hollywood’s “award season” is over, the book world’s is getting started, and, in what may be a preview of the Pulitzer, Edward P. Jones’ much lauded novel, The Known World, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It took him so long to write this book that he was too embarrassed to call his agent when he finally finished it. Lucky for him, it seems to have worked out quite well. The winners in the other categories are: Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy by Paul Hendrickson in the general non-fiction category; Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman in the biography category; River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit for criticism; and Columbarium by Susan Stewart for poetry. As I may have mentioned before, the NBCC Award is great because it is not limited to American books — it includes all books written in English — and because, unlike the Pulitzer, it doesn’t skew towards rewarding books that are focused on American themes, thus allowing a book like Khrushchev to be praised.A New Wave of Graphic NovelsScott McCloud writes on his blog that the runaway experimentalism in comics in recent years has given way to a return to storytelling. The shining stars of this new trend are Blankets by Craig Thompson and an upcoming anthology called Flight.
The Booker’s Dozen: The 2012 Booker Longlist
And the Finalists for the Best Translated Book Awards Are…
We’re very proud to announce the finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards here on The Millions. This is the ninth iteration of the awards, which have honored a variety of books and authors over the years, including Can Xue (who won in 2015 for The Last Lover) and László Krasznahorkai (the only two-time winner for Satantango and Seiobo There Below). On the poetry side of things, past winners include Rocío Cerón (Diorama), Elisa Biagini (The Guest in the Wood), and Kiwao Nomura (Spectacle & Pigsty), among others.
Five years ago, Amazon started underwriting the awards through their Literary Partnership program, providing $20,000 in cash prizes every year, which is split up equally between the winning authors and translators. After this year’s awards have been granted, the Best Translated Book Awards will have given out $100,000 to international authors and translators.
This year’s winners will be announced on Wednesday, May 4th at 7pm sharp, both online at Three Percent and live in person at The Folly (92 W. Houston St. in Manhattan). If you’re in the New York City area, please feel free to stop by. The event is open to the public.
More information about the awards, the finalists, and the celebrations can be found at the Three Percent.
First off, here are the 10 fiction finalists:
A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Angola, Archipelago Books)
Arvida by Samuel Archibald, translated from the French by Donald Winkler (Canada, Biblioasis)
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy, Europa Editions)
The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (Bulgaria, Open Letter)
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (Mexico, And Other Stories)
Moods by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole (Israel, New Directions)
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson (Brazil, New Directions)
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Mexico, Coffee House Press)
War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent (Spain, Open Letter)
Murder Most Serene by Gabrielle Wittkop, translated from the French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie (France, Wakefield Press)
This year’s fiction judges are: Amanda Bullock (Literary Arts, Portland), Heather Cleary (translator from the Spanish, co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review), Kevin Elliott (57th Street Books), Kate Garber (192 Books), Jason Grunebaum (translator from the Hindi, writer), Mark Haber (writer, Brazos Bookstore), Stacey Knecht (translator from Czech and Dutch), Amanda Nelson (Book Riot), and P.T. Smith (writer and reader).
In terms of the BTBA for poetry, here are the six finalists:
Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan (Brazil, Phoneme Media)
Empty Chairs: Selected Poems by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern (China, Graywolf)
Load Poems Like Guns: Women’s Poetry from Herat, Afghanistan, edited and translated from the Persian by Farzana Marie (Afghanistan, Holy Cow! Press)
Silvina Ocampo by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss (Argentina, NYRB)
The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper by Abdourahman A. Waberi, translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson (Djibouti, Seagull Books)
Sea Summit by Yi Lu, translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (China, Milkweed)
The judges for this year’s poetry award are: Jarrod Annis (Greenlight Bookstore), Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Words Without Borders), Tess Lewis (writer and translator), Becka McKay (writer and translator), and Deborah Smith (writer, translator, founder of Tilted Axis).
Booker Laureates
Last night I had the opportunity to attend part of a reading by the new Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre (he won for Vernon God Little), and Dan Rhodes, whose book Timoleon Vieta Come Home was shortlisted. Rhodes went first, mentioning that were he to purchase a star map, he would be interested only in finding Morissey’s house. He then read some super short stories from his “cult favorite,” Anthropology: and a Hundred Other Stories, which were charming and amusing in a Richard Brautigan sort of way. Here are four of them. Perhaps the high point was when he read some unpublished work, which turned out to be a story he wrote when he was seven. It was about a pop star/football star who “goes wee on everyone.” DBC Pierre, when it was his turn to read, offered this interesting nugget: he said that since he is a new writer he does not read very much for fear of corrupting his fragile writing voice — an odd sentiment, but one that I’m sure some writers can relate to.
Booker Shortlist Heavy on Big Names
Some of the biggest names in literature got the nod from the Booker judges for this year’s shortlist including J.M. Coetzee, A.S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel. Co-favorite of the oddsmakers, Sarah Waters, made the cut, while the other favorite, Colm Toibin did not. The longlist was offered here with some excerpts less than a month ago, but since you might not have gotten around to them then, we’ll offer the same with the shortlist below.
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
Summertime by J.M Coetzee (excerpt)
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (excerpt)
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (excerpt pdf)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (excerpt pdf)