Wiesław Mysliwski Wins Best Translated Book Award for Fiction

By Jason Boog 

Wiesław Mysliwski’s Stone Upon Stone (translated by Bill Johnston) has won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction. The poetry prize went to Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander)

The annual award is offered by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, honoring “the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the previous year.” The winning translators and writers will share a $20,000 award donated by Amazon.

Here’s more about Mysliwski’s novel: “Stone Upon Stone—his first work to be translated into English—is narrated by Syzmek, a Polish farmer determined to build a tomb for himself after a life of boozing, brawling, fighting in the resistance, serving as a marriage officer, and exaggerating his way through the twentieth century and the modernization of his small town … This is the second book published by Archipelago, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit press, to win the award. (Attila Bartis’s Tranquility won in 2009.)”