World Literary Awards

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National Book Award for Translated Literature なしょなるぶっくしょう(ほんやくぶんがく)

Edition 5 (2022)

Translated literatureFictionNonfiction

Winners

10 people

Seven stories turn domestic spaces and unstable memories into scenes of creeping unease. Schweblin shows how the familiar can slip into estrangement through a sharp, fable-like imagination.

A house can hold silence, but it can also hold dread.

209 pages
short storiesuneasememoryfamilyfable-like realism
Jon Fosse Nominee

The final volume of Septology follows the painter Asle and his double on Norway's coast, tracing memory, faith, love, art, and time in a hypnotic prose flow.

Two Asles trace the border between life, faith, and memory.

224 pages
painterdoublememoryfaithtime

A novel of Rwandan history and female memory that folds genocide, folklore, and lived experience into a story of recovery and witness.

Folklore and memory quietly call back what history tried to erase.

152 pages
Rwandagenocidememorywomenfolklore
Mónica Ojeda Nominee

At an all-girls Catholic school, friendship, occult games, and desire spiral into a multivocal horror novel about adolescence and fear.

Friendship swells until it feels like a curse.

264 pages
adolescencehorrordesirefriendshipritual
Yōko Tawada たわだ ようこ Nominee

A cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, language, and communication in a fractured world.

In a scattered world, language is the only bridge.

234 pages
friendshiplanguagedystopiacommunicationdisplacement

A sweeping historical novel about Ibn Arabi that follows spiritual quest, desire, travel, and the making of a thinker across the Islamic world.

Travel and thought combine to bring one mystic life into view.

522 pages
historical fictionSufismtravelfaithphilosophy

A story collection that probes memory, silence, and pressure in contemporary Iran, finding quiet tension in lives shaped by repression.

Beneath silence, the cracks in daily life slowly widen.

109 pages
short storiesIranrepressionmemoryfaith
Olga Ravn Longlisted

Set aboard a spaceship, a dossier of human and nonhuman employees turns labor, feeling, and identity into a speculative inquiry into what makes a person human.

On the ship, the meaning of work slowly changes.

149 pages
science fictionlaborhumanityspaceshipdossier
Saša Stanišić Longlisted

A memoir-like book that retraces a return to place and family history, thinking through migration, belonging, and the stories that make a home.

To return is also to retell the past.

282 pages
memoryhomemigrationfamilymemoir
Olga Tokarczuk Longlisted

A vast historical novel about Jacob Frank that weaves religion, empire, desire, and violence into a polyphonic account of 18th-century Europe.

Many voices overlap around a single life.

993 pages
historical fictionreligionJewish historypolyphonyempire