By: News Archive
Fitzcarraldo Editions have been awarded the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize for the novel Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne. The £10,000 prize-pot though, which is half-funded by the University of East Anglia through their Publishing Project, will be shared among the five presses shortlisted for this year’s award. This decision was made to support all of the publishers on the shortlist in what is an extremely difficult time for small businesses and freelancers. The win makes Fitzcarraldo the first press to win the Republic of Consciousness twice, after taking the inaugural prize in 2017 for Counternarratives by John Keene. It is also the first translated book to win the prize.
The judges had this to say about Animalia:
"Frank Wynne - one of the best translators working today - does a masterful job of capturing Jean Baptiste Del Amo’s rich, lyrical and inventive style as he explores the (mis)fortunes of a peasant farming family in France across five generations, against a backdrop of war, economic disaster and industrialisation. This is no pastoral - it is a savage and brutal book, replete with sex and violence, which is also spellbinding, strange and immersive."
Fitzcarraldo Editions is a small publisher based in Deptford, South-East London. It was founded in 2014 by Jacques Testard, who still runs the company. Their remarkable eye for talent has seen them publish the Nobel Prize winners for 2015, Svetlana Alexievich, and 2018, Olga Tokarczuk, in each case before they won the prize.
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, born in 1981, is one of France’s most exciting and ambitious young writers. He is the author of Pornographia, Le sel, and Une education libertine, which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. Animalia, his fourth novel, is his first to appear in English. Frank Wynne is a literary translator. He has translated works by Francophone authors including Michel Houellebecq and Patrick Modiano. He also translates from Spanish. His work has earned various awards.
The rest of the shortlist, which will all receive £2,000, is: Broken Jaw by Minoli Salgado (the87press), Love by Hanne Ørstavik, tr. Martin Aitken (And Other Stories), Patience by Toby Litt (Galley Beggar Press) and We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner (Dostoyevsky Wannabe).
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