The future is in translation! Catch up on global literary news as our editors report on major international award winners, breakthrough publications, and exhibitions fusing poetry with visual art.
Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
On April 9, Madhu Sriwastav was announced as the winner of the 2023 Muse India’s GSP Rao Translation Award for her work on Post Box 203 Nala Sopara by Chitra Mudgal, translated from the Hindi. Three other translators on the shortlist also received the jury’s commendation: Priyamvada R for her translation of Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True from the Tamil; Sridhar M and Alladi Uma for their translation of Telugu: The Best Stories of Our Times, edited by Volga; as well as Ratan Kumar Chattopadhyay for his translation of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s The Puppet’s Tale from the Bengali.
In other book prize news, the jury of the 2024 JCB Prize for Indian Literature was recently announced. Chaired by writer and translator Jerry Pinto, the other members include art historian and curator Deepthi Sasidharan; filmmaker and writer Shaunak Sen; scholar and translator Tridip Suhrud; and the artist Aqui Thami. The prize is currently open for entries, with the shortlist, the longlist, and the winner announced in September, October, and November respectively. Since the prize began in 2018, five out of six winners have been books in translation, with three out of those five being originally written in Malayalam.
On the subject of the JCB Prize, Perumal Murugan—who finally won the prize in 2023 after being shortlisted twice in 2018 and 2019—recently signed a five-book deal with Penguin Random House India. The selected titles, which have already received great acclaim in their original Tamil, will be translated into English and published over the course of six years. The roster includes one novel, one short story collection, two books on film consolidated into one, one text on education, and a longform interview between Murugan and the human rights activist Bezwada Wilson. There are already well-known translators attached to these projects: Meena Kandasamy, V. Ishwarya, Kavita Muralidharan, and Gita Subramanian. Easily the most translated Tamil author in contemporary times, this deal will ensure that even more of Perumal Murugan’s works become available to the anglophone readership.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
In early April, the El Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied: Poems (Copper Canyon Press) and Solito: A Memoir (Hogarth Press), received the prestigious Whiting Award. In the announcement, the Whiting’s selection committee named Zamora “a powerful writer, a necessary writer”, and describing his two books as texts that “tunnel deeply into the experience of crossing the border as a child . . . His work transmutes testimony into art; whatever he turns his eye on next will also enlarge us.”
In March, Brazilian visual artist Clarissa Tossin presented her film entitled Before the Volcanoes Sing at the Whitney Museum, and was joined by famed Maya K’iche’ Kaqchikel poet Rosa Chávez and Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal—both from Guatemala. Some of Rosa’s poems are still on display at the Whitney in New York City. In October 2020, Rosa’s work was featured in Asymptote, translated into English by Guatemalan-American poet Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, and a profile about her was also published on the blog.
Through April 5-6, Rosa also was part of Central American Futurities, hosted by Yale University. She joined the likes of poet John Manuel Arias; editor, poet, and filmmaker Daniel Flores y Ascencio; journalist and human rights activist Andrea Ixchíu; and activist and social anthropologist Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj.
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