August is Women in Translation Month
There are many, many book prizes out there, and I follow an awful lot of them. It is heartening to see the variety of work that is being published, but it also means that I am constantly aware of how many books I’m never going to get to.
I became aware of Women in Translation Month and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation last year. Unlike just about every other award, the prize administrators put out a Google Doc of all the eligible entries, which you can find here (dreaded PDF format). A shortlist will be announced in a few weeks and the winner will be announced in November. Of the 92 entries I’ve read a grand total of 6:
- Celestial Bodies
- Convenience Store Woman
- Optic Nerve
- The Last Children of Tokyo (published in the US as The Emissary)
- The Pine Islands
- The Years
I do have a number of them on the TBR as well, and while I doubt I’ll read them this month, I’ll read and then post reviews here on the blog as I work my way through my list. On the TBR:
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
- Katalin Street
- Love in the New Millenium
- The Remainder
- Tokyo Ueno Station
And I’ve read other books by authors listed here, notably Samantha Schweblin and Leila Slimani.
I like this prize because it combines two categories that I try to read in: literature written by women and translated literature, and I always find books I’ve never heard of but which sound up my alley.
