2024 Book Prize Shortlist: Translation
WINNER: Shushan Avagyan, A Book, Untitled, translated from Armenian by Deanna
Cachoian-Schanz (AWST Press, 2023)
Written as a literary experiment, A Book, Untitled puts Armenian modernist writers in a world beyond their native literary landscape, populated by such contemporaries as Marina Tsvetaeva, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. As the reader navigates 26.5 chapters of seemingly unrelated vignettes in disparate and unidentified voices, they discover that Avagyan, while writing the novel as a translator’s diary, is also mapping out a larger archival or archaeological site: an imagined encounter between two literary giants of the twentieth century, Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan, whose legacies had been censored by the Tsarist and Stalinist regimes. The imagined encounter between these two authors in 1926 is juxtaposed with a contemporary conversation between the novel’s unnamed narrator—an archivist and translator referred to as the “typist/writer”—and her friend Lara, who are both piecing together their feminist predecessors' fragmented stories.
Marcel Proust, The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts,
translated from French by Sam Taylor (Harvard University Press, 2023)
Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early manuscripts of the twentieth century’s most towering literary figure offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his masterpiece. One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois’s private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis.
Fradl Shtok, From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories, translated from
Yiddish by Jordan Finkin and Allison Schachter (Northwestern University
Press, 2022)
The translation of Fradl Shtok’s From the Jewish Provinces revives a nearly forgotten collection of Yiddish modernist masterpieces. Shtok’s collection of short stories represents one of the only known volumes of Yiddish modernist short fiction authored by a woman. In sophisticated prose, the stories describe the travails of young women looking for love and desire in a world that spurns them. These young Jewish women struggle with disabled bodies, sexual violence, and unwanted marriage. Some strive to imagine themselves as artists, while others lose themselves in fantasy worlds or look with desperate longing at the non-Jewish men that surround them. Through deft portraits of her characters’ inner worlds Shtok gives us access to unglimpsed corners of the Jewish imagination. The translation intervenes in the literary history of Yiddish prose to show women’s active participation in modernist experimentation.
Murathan Mungan, Valor: Stories, translated from Turkish by Aron Aji and
David Gramling (Northwestern University Press, 2022)
Among the array of Turkish literature available in English, one of the most glaring gaps is the work of Murathan Mungan (b. 1955), author of over sixty books--of poetry, fiction, plays, screenplays and essays--produced in the course of a forty-year writing career. To date, only a handful of his poems and short fiction have appeared in English (many in Aji’s and Gramling’s own co-translations), and no book-length work had been translated yet until Valor. Cenk Hikayeleri/Valor (1986) has long been considered by Turkish critics as a milestone of modern Turkish literature deserving of international reception. Valor reflects most vividly the author’s multi-ethnic, Kurdish-Arab-Turkish background, and represents his lush poetics, literary breadth, and his enduring sociopolitical commitments.
Nominating Committee: Christos Hadjiyiannis, University of Regensberg (Chair), María del Pilar Blanco, University of Oxford, Harris Feinsod, Johns Hopkins University
About
Every other year, the Modernist Studies Association seeks nominations for
its Translation Prize, awarded to a book published in the
previous two years. A panel of judges determines the book that made the
most significant contribution to modernist studies.
Please visit our Nominations page in Spring 2026 to recommend a book(published in 2024 or 2025). Visit our Archive to see previous winners.