Huge congratulations to Dubravka Ugresic for winning the “2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature!” From the press release:<\/p>\n
\nWorld Literature Today<\/em>, the University of Oklahoma\u2019s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, announced late Friday evening that novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugre\u0161i\u0107 has been named the 24th laureate of the renowned Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Awarded in alternating years with the NSK<\/span> Neustadt Prize for Children\u2019s Literature, the Neustadt Prize recognizes outstanding literary merit in literature worldwide.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nBorn in the former Yugoslavia and now residing in Amsterdam, Ugre\u0161i\u0107 is considered one of Europe\u2019s most distinctive novelists and essayists. Marked by a combination of irony and compassion, her books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and she is the winner of several other major literary prizes, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1998) and Jean Am\u00e9ry Essay Prize (2012). She was also a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2009, and her work Karaoke Culture (2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nAllison Anderson, an American literary translator and writer residing in Switzerland, nominated Ugre\u0161i\u0107 and served as one of nine jurors on the 2016 Neustadt Prize panel. She commented that \u201cDubravka\u2019s win is a double win for me because she is a non-[native] English speaker and a woman. I came across her work back in 1997 when I was on contract to teach English in Croatia and fell in love with her essays. As someone who voluntarily went into exile, she describes the shared experience of solitude with her stories of refugees. She covers injustice, corruption and everything that\u2019s wrong in the world, but in a quiet way.\u201d [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nHighly respected within the literary community for its recognition of excellence, the Neustadt Prize is often referred to as the \u201cAmerican Nobel\u201d for its reputation as a lead-up to the Swedish Academy\u2019s annual selection. Any living author writing from anywhere in the world is eligible for the Neustadt prize. The jury is comprised of acclaimed international authors, and that fact helps to keep external pressure from booksellers, publishers, and others who may have interest in influencing the outcome. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nThe Neustadt Prize is the first international literary award of this scope to originate in the United States and is one of the very few international prizes for which poets, novelists and playwrights are equally eligible. Winners are awarded $50,000, a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver and a certificate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I discovered Dubravka back in the Dalkey days, when I read an interview with her in BOMB<\/span><\/em> in which she talked about a book of essays she’d written and was having trouble publishing because it was so critical of all the facets of the book industry. Immediately sold! This book became “Thank You for Not Reading<\/em>“http:\/\/www.dalkeyarchive.com\/product\/thank-you-for-not-reading\/ and is probably the book—along with Karaoke Culture<\/i>—through which most readers have discovered her distinctive voice. <\/p>\n
Fun trivia fact: The first book ever published by Open Letter was Dubravka’s Nobody’s Home<\/em>.<\/a> Since then we’ve brought out Karaoke Culture<\/em><\/a> and most recently Europe in Sepia.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n
Having read every bit of her work that’s been published in English—Dubravka is most definitely one of my all-time favorite authors, and a cornerstone of the Open Letter catalog—I could go on and on about which titles of hers you should read and why. If I limit myself to six, I would choose: Thank You for Not Reading, Karaoke Culture, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Lend Me Your Character<\/em> and Europe in Sepia.<\/em> So go buy all of those and read them!<\/p>\n
*<\/center><\/p>\n This is the last time I’m going to mention it (promise!), but having been involved in the publication of both of this year’s Nobel Prize and Neustadt Prize winners, I’m pretty sure we publish “important” books. (And I think my rage over the \u00c8nard situation is officially over. We’ve been kicking a lot of ass over the past week, and there’s no way I’m letting some silly foreign rights agent taint that.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Huge congratulations to Dubravka Ugresic for winning the “2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature!” From the press release: World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma\u2019s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, announced late Friday evening that novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugre\u0161i\u0107 has been named the 24th laureate of the renowned Neustadt International Prize for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[2186,53626],"class_list":["post-302856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-dubravka-ugresic","tag-neustadt-prize"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":335456,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302856\/revisions\/335456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}