2024 Italian Prose in Translation Award Shortlist Citations

Commander of the River

By Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson

Indiana University Press

Ali Farah’s bildungsroman tells the story of Yabar, a young black Roman, and his coming of age in a multilingual and multiracial Rome that nonetheless presents significant obstacles to his sense of self and belonging. Hope Campbell Gustafson’s skilled translation seamlessly shifts between Yabar’s colloquial speech and the poetic grandeur of Somali-inspired tales passed on through generations. The result is a vibrant, fresh, and timeless novel that tackles difficult questions about racism, trauma, youth, and family relationships.

Her Side of the Story

By Alba de Cespedes

Translated by Jill Foulston

Astra House | Pushkin Press

In bold, digressive prose, Her Side of the Story powerfully explores the intersections between the personal, the domestic, and the political. Its narrator, Alessandra, leads us through a shifting maze of a childhood and young adulthood in Rome under fascist rule. Jill Foulston vividly renders the nuances of Alessandra’s experience, capturing De Cespedes’s deeply introspective language in lucid, gripping English. Once censored for her work, De Cespedes is an author whose ripples in Italian fiction can still be felt today; her work has been missing from the English-language literary conversation for far too long.

The House on Via Gemito
By Domenico Starnone

Translated by Oonagh Stransky

Europa Editions

Dialect is a perennial challenge for translators, and this portrait of domestic brutality and frustrated artistic ambition is riddled with it: a Neapolitan that in the mouth of the narrator’s father becomes as creative and violent as the character himself. Oonagh Stransky demonstrates her expertise by retaining the original often enough to help readers develop a feel for the regional language, then rendering the rest in a knife-like English that is vulgar while avoiding folksiness. Her skillful choices give us the impression of encountering and understanding more dialect than we actually do, enhancing the richly textured fabric of this novel. Combined with her ear for what she calls Starnone’s “explosive and yet contained prose,” the result is pitch-perfect.

The Hunger of Women

By Marosia Castaldi

Translated by Jamie Richards

And Other Stories

In incantatory prose—part reverie, part prose poem, part feast—The Hunger of Women asks us to reconsider the many forms of unacknowledged labor associated with homemaking, cooking, and caretaking. What would it mean to reclaim pleasure after a lifetime of limitation? Jamie Richards’s translation rises to the many hidden challenges of bringing Castaldi’s novel into English, including her hypnotic repetition and minimal punctuation; she recreates the narrator's descriptions of her many recipes and ingredients in mouth-watering detail. These features lend a near-epic quality to this deceptively unassuming (and joyfully queer) story of resilience.

Lies and Sorcery

By Elsa Morante

Translated by Jenny McPhee

New York Review Books | Penguin Classics UK

At last, Jenny McPhee has beautifully restored this decadent, sprawling novel by a giant of Italian literature. An infamously pared-down version was all we had of the novel in English until now, perhaps since Morante’s impressive range of voices, tones, and forms requires its own kind of sorcery—difficult to achieve at all, let alone in a book of this scope and length. Yet McPhee renders the baroque glitter of Morante’s language and the muscle beneath its dry, smooth coils. The rhythm of her translation dances—backwards and in heels, without a misstep—across nearly eight hundred pages, through melodrama, romance, poetry, picaresque humor and psychological suspense. Thanks to McPhee, Lies and Sorcery now has the English version it deserves.