Schweblin’s work, translated by Megan McDowell, shares the “long list” of the US National Book Foundation, in the category of Translated Literature, with nine other foreign authors, including Mónica Ojeda, for her novel ” Jaw”, and Olga Tockarzuk, who had already been a finalist for translated literature in 2018 and shortlisted in 2019, for the prize awarded by this entity.
The ten titles were originally written in nine different languages: German, Arabic, Danish, Spanish, French, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, and Polish.
The award, initiated in 1950, recognizes literary works published by US publishers during the year prior to its award.
The seven stories in the collection by Samanta Schweblin, with which the author won the IV International Prize for Short Narrative Ribera del Duero, were published in Argentina by Páginas de Espuma and present stories in which families are missing people, memories, love, furniture or intimacy.
Meanwhile, in Ojeda’s novel, translated by Sarah Booker, two Catholic high school classmates are brought together by their mutual love of horror stories and become inseparable, almost mirror images of one another. It is inspired by the phenomenon of terror on the Internet, the “creepypastas”, and creates a world in which villains and victims are impossible to distinguish, says the organizing entity on its website.
Tokarzuk’s selected work “The Books of Jacob”, translated by Jennifer Croft, is an epic tale based on a real historical figure, Jacob Frank, set in the mid-18th century, where the arrival of a charming young Jew in a Polish village , and his consequent reinventions of himself, attracts enemies and a growing public that believes him to be the Messiah.
The other shortlisted works are “Ibn Arabi’s Small Death”, by Mohammed Hasan Alwan; “A New Name: Septology VI-VII,” by Jon Fosse; Shahriar Mandanipour’s “Seasons of Purgatory”; “Kibogo”, by Scholastique Mukasonga; Olga Raven’s “The Employees”; “Where You Come From”, by Saša Stanišić; “Scattered All Over the Earth” by Yoko Tawada.
The finalists in the five categories – Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Children’s Literature and Translation – will be announced on Tuesday, October 4, according to the Foundation.
Source: Ambito
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