PEN Award Shortlists [Spoiler: One of Our Books is a Finalist!]

PEN just announced the shortlists for a ton of their annual awards, including the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the PEN Translation Prize, which, for obvious reasons, are the ones that I’m most interested in.

First off, here’s the poetry shortlist, which is the one featuring an Open Letter title:

Spit Temple by Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse), Rosa Alcalá

Diadem by Marosa di Giorgio (BOA Editions), Adam Giannelli

Tales of a Severed Head by Rachida Madani (Yale University Press), Marilyn Hacker

The Smoke of Distant Fires by Eduardo Chirinos (Open Letter Books), G. J. Racz

Almost 1 Book/Almost 1 Life by Elfriede Czurda (Burning Deck), Rosmarie Waldrop

The Shock of the Lenders and Other Poems by Jorge Santiago Perednik (Action Books), Molly Weigel

Don Mee Choi is the judge for this award, and to digress for a second, I want to recommend her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s book of poetry, All the Garbage of the World, Unite! As I mentioned on here before (and in our podcast), I recently judged a South Korean literature contest and this was one of the absolute best books that was included. She’s a fantastic translator and All the Garbage of the World, Unite! is a really interesting, strange collection. (And has a fun title.)

Moving onto the PEN Translation Prize, here are the finalists:

A Long Day’s Evening by Bilge Karasu (City Lights Books), Aron Aji and Fred Stark

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector (New Directions), Alison Entrekin

Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Rosalind Harvey

The Cardboard House by Martín Adán (New Directions), Katherine Silver

The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen (Galileo Publishers), Donald O. White

Really solid list, although Maidenhair deserves to be on there . . . and no Satantango? Anyway . . . Judging this award are Margaret Carson, Bill Johnston, and Alex Zucker.

Congrats to all the authors, translators, and publishers. The winners will be announced in August, and we’ll post about them here when they are . . .