Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! Another day, another dollar, another slew of literary prizes to report. This week, the PEN prizes were of special interest: Two Lines Press’ translation of Baboon, written by Danish author Naja Marie Aidt with translation by Denise Neuman has snagged the PEN Translation Prize (for a short-story excerpt from Baboon, click here!—or better yet: read Eric MIchael Becker’s exclusive interview with the author here). Meanwhile, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize (for translations of German-into-English) is slated to go to Catherine Schelbert, for her translation of Hugo Ball’s Flametti. And the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize has announced its shortlist, which includes our own friend of the blog (and Tiff-ster) Susan Bernofsky, for her translation of German writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (coincidentally reviewed here in our latest issue).
If international prizes are more your thing, go ahead and check out the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction—which features a more global array of writers, including several, like Hungarian phenom Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Argentinian César Aira, and Mozambican Mia Couto, whose writing we’ve featured either in the journal or on the blog in recent years.
Remember when reading used to be fun? Via Electric Literature, this webcomic’s meant to serve as reminder: A Reader’s Manifesto. Or books can be worth watching, too, as in the PBS adaptation of English author Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, historical stranger-truth-than-fiction successfully transferred to the boob tube.
Children are constantly being hushed, but are rarely censored. In South Korea, a book of poems bucks the trend, thanks to a ten-year-old’s “disturbing” poem about eating their parents. And you may have read (or heard about, at least) the recent Sunday New York Times exposé about the plight of (often immigrant) nail workers and their health-hazardous occupations. But did you think about how translation imported on the reportage?
Finally, a note of sadness: blog editor Eva Richter is leaving the blog after nearly one-and-a-half years of dedicated emailing, editing, posting, and reading. I wish her well—especially since she’s off to launch a new publishing house, Spurl—check it out!