Nona Fernández, Maryse Condé, and Maria Stepanova are among the authors longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.
The National Book Foundation revealed the longlist Tuesday, which contains 10 books representing seven different languages.
Fernández was nominated for The Twilight Zone, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Fernández and Wimmer were previously longlisted for the prize in 2019 for Space Invaders. Two other translations of Spanish-language books made the longlist: Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, translated by Adrian Nathan West, and Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island: Stories, translated by Christina MacSweeney.
Condé made the longlist for Waiting for the Waters to Rise, translated from the French by Richard Philcox. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, is the other French-language book to earn a nomination.
Stepanova was nominated for In Memory of Memory, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, as was Ge Fei for Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse.
Samar Yazbek made the longlist for Planet of Clay, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. Price was a finalist for the 2019 prize for her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work.
Rounding out the list are Bo-Young Kim’s On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, translated from the Korean by Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell, and Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, translated from the German by Jackie Smith.
The longlist will be winnowed down into a five-book shortlist, which will be announced on Oct. 5. The winners will be revealed at a ceremony on Nov. 17.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
