Congratulations to Juan Cárdenas and translator Lizzie Davis, whose The Devil of the Provinces has been longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature!
Finalists for this year’s awards in all categories will be announced Tuesday, October 3, and winners in all categories will be announced live at the National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 15.
In 2022, Mónica Ojeda, Sarah Booker, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke were named finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the National Book Award for Poetry, respectively. Art Spiegelman was presented with the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
All of us at Coffee House send our congratulations to Juan and Lizzie, and our thanks to the National Book Foundation and prize judges for recognizing their literary achievements!
More about the longlisters:
Juan Cárdenas (1978) is a Colombian art critic, curator, translator, and author of seven works of fiction, most recently the story collection Volver a comer del árbol de la ciencia and the novel Elástico de sombra. He has translated the works of such writers as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Gordon Lish, David Ohle, J. M. Machado de Assis, and Eça de Queirós. In 2014, his novel Los estratos received the Otras Voces Otros Ámbitos Prize. In 2017, he was named one of the thirty-nine best Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine by the Hay Festival in Bogotá. Cárdenas currently coordinates the masters program in creative writing at the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogotá, where he works as a professor and researcher.
Lizzie Davis is a translator, a writer, and an editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent projects include Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize); Elena Medel’s The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Aura García-Junco.