PEN America Literary Award: translations of books by Aseev and Serhii Zhadan on the long list

Stanislav Aseev's books/Facebook

Stanislav Aseev's books “Light Path: The Story of One Concentration Camp” and Serhiy Zhadan's “How Fire Descends” translated into English were nominated for the PEN America Translation Prize.< /p>

Publications by Ukrainian authors were included in the prize's longlists as translations into English. This was announced by Stanislav Aseev on Facebook.

The book “Light Path: The Story of One Concentration Camp” translated by Nina Murray and Zena Tompkins was included in the longlist for an award from the American PEN Club. It was published in English under the title “The Torture Camp on Paradise Street”.

The book tells how Stanislav Aseev was a prisoner of a terrorist concentration camp in occupied Donetsk for 28 months. He was sent there on fabricated charges of “espionage” in May 2017 and was released on December 29, 2019.

Last year, we published “Kativnya na Raiska Street” to help English-speaking readers around the world understand that giving in to Russian pressure and terror means not just giving up a piece of territory, but abandoning real, living people and dooming them to illegal imprisonment, torture, humiliation , rape or death at the hands of Russian soldiers and special services, literary critic Oleg Kotsyuba commented on the nomination.

In addition to Stanislav Aseev's book, the collection “How Fire Descends” by Sergey Zhadan, translated by Wanda Phipps and Virlyana Tkach, also made it to the long list. The work was nominated in the “Poetry translation” category.

PEN America Translation Prize is an annual award for book translations of prose from any language into English. The prize in the amount of $3,000 has been awarded since 1963 and is presented to the translator of the winning book.