The £1000 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature, has announced a longlist for the 2022 edition.
The prize, which also aims to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership, is generously supported in 2022 by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Warwick Institute of Engagement.
Judged by Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett, last year the prize was awarded to An Inventory of Losses (MacLehose Press), written by Judith Schalansky and translated from German by Jackie Smith.
According to a statement by the organisers, this year’s longlist includes Argentinian and Georgian poetry, Japanese short stories and novels from Argentina, Catalonia, India and Syria. Three of the longlisted works are literary non-fiction: of these two offer a collective history of a place – an East Berlin suburb is portrayed through the stories told to the author when she was working as a chiropodist, and the metamorphosis of a Swedish village is recounted through a series of interviews with its people – and the third non-fiction title narrates the natural history, and emotional and cultural significance, of slime.
The 2022 competition received a total of 138 eligible entries representing 33 languages; this is the largest number of submissions made to the prize to date. The longlist covers 11 languages, with translations from Greek and Hindi represented for the first time in 2022. 12 publishers are represented, with the independent publisher Cassava Republic Press longlisted for their first submission to the prize while Fitzcarraldo Editions continues its unbroken run on the longlist since the prize was established in 2017.
The judges said of the 2022 longlist: “Our longlist this year showcases the enormous range and strength of translated writing by women from around the world. It covers not only a huge span of languages and cultures, from Hindi to Catalan, Arabic to Japanese, but a spectrum of genres that runs from supernatural stories to sensual verse, historical epic to micro-biological investigation. Some are relayed through multiple alternating voices; others by protagonists who reveal disquieting and haunting inner worlds of dreams, amnesia or elective silence. Fiction long and short, poetry, oral history and scientific narrative all find a place in this feast of literary creativity.”
The full list of longlisted titles, in alphabetical order, is as follows:
- Violaine Huisman, The Book of Mother, translated from French by Leslie Camhi (Little, Brown Book Group (Virago), 2021)
- Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021)
- Selva Almada, Brickmakers, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 2021)
- Katja Oskamp, Marzahn, Mon Amour, translated from German by Jo Heinrich (Peirene Press, 2022)
- Faïza Guène, Men Don’t Cry, translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone (Cassava Republic Press, 2021)
- Marit Kapla, Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, translated from Swedish by Peter Graves (Penguin Random House (Allen Lane), 2021)
- Samar Yazbek, Planet of Clay, translated from Arabic by Leri Price (World Editions, 2021)
- Susanne Wedlich, Slime: A Natural History, translated from German by Ayça Türkoğlu (Granta, 2021)
- Kyoko Nakajima, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian McCullough MacDonald (Sort of Books, 2021)
- Margarita Liberaki, Three Summers, translated from Greek by Karen Van Dyck (Penguin Random House (Viking), 2021)
- Diana Bellessi, To Love A Woman, translated from Spanish by Leo Boix (Poetry Translation Centre, 2022)
- Geetanjali Shree, Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell (Tilted Axis Press, 2021)
- Irene Solà, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Granta, 2022)
- Diana Anphimiadi, Why I No Longer Write Poems, translated from Georgian by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Jean Sprackland (Bloodaxe Books and Poetry Translation Centre, 2022)
