The 2024 National Book Awards Longlist for Translated Literature

Tuesday, we covered the announcement of the 2024 National Book Awards Longlist for Young People’s Literature. Since then, this year’s National Book Awards Longlist for Translated Literature has also been released.

The ten titles on the longlist were translated from six different languages—Danish, Arabic, Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese, and Swedish. They explore everything from “disorienting realities” to characters who “traverse countries in search of answers” to “the experiences of two Indigenous Sámi families over the course of three generations and one hundred years.”

Here are the ten longlist titles, selected from the 141 books that were submitted:

The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren
The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain
Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
Woodworm by Layla Martínez, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott
The Villain’s Dance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary
The Abyss by Fernando Vallejo, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price