Award-Winning Readings: National Book Award Nominees and Finalists in Translated Literature

Anya Migdal is a writer, translator, and actor living in New York. Tatyana Tolstaya’s Aetherial Worlds (Alfred A. Knopf), which Anya translated, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. With the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own, Tolstaya transmutes the quotidian into aetherial alternatives. These tales, about politics, identity, love, and loss, cut to the core of the Russian psyche, even as they lay bare human universals. Tolstaya’s characters–seekers all–are daydreaming children, lonely adults, dislocated foreigners in unfamiliar lands. Whether contemplating the strategic complexities of delivering telegrams in Leningrad or the meditative melancholy of holiday aspic, vibrant inner lives and the grim elements of existence are registered in equally sharp detail in a starkly bleak but sympathetic vision of life on earth.

Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad, Iraq. After graduating from the University of Baghdad, she worked as a journalist and translator for the Baghdad Observer. Facing censorship and interrogation, she left Iraq, first to Jordan and then to America. She is the author of The Iraqi Nights, Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea, and The War Works Hard, as well as her edited volume, 15 Iraqi Poets. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Knights Foundation grant, a Kresge Fellowship, and the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing and works as a special lecturer of Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan. The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (New Directions) is her most recent book. Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. Mikhail extensively interviews several of these women―who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been sexually abused, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons―and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety.

 

Heather Cleary’s translations include César Rendueles’s Sociophobia, Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets and The Dark, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions. Her latest translation is Comemadre (Coffee House Press), nominated for the National Book Award in Translated Literature, is Roque Larraquy’s first book published in English. In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consequence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.

Jennifer Croft is a 2018–19 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. She is also the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and a Tin House Scholarship for her novel Homesick, originally written in Spanish. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Tin House, Lit Hub, Guernica, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the translator of Flights (Riverhead Books) by Olga Tokarczuk, Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and shortlisted for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.