The writer who lives in Porrentruy has won one of the most prestigious prizes in the Anglo-Saxon world: a National Book Award, “translated novel” category. She is rewarded for her first novel written in 2016, “Winter in Sokcho”. It was published in its original version by Éditions Zoé, then translated into English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins for the American publishing house Open letter.
Read also his portrait:
The traveling houses of Elisa Shua Dusapin
In “Winter in Sokcho”, Elisa Shua Dusapin explores the themes of identity, the relationship to language, the meeting of cultures. The novel has won several Swiss and French literary prizes, including the Robert-Walser Prize, the Alpha Prize and the Régine Deforges Prize.
Born in 1992 in France, Elisa Shua Dusapin grew up between Paris, Seoul and Porrentruy. She graduated in 2014 from the Swiss Literary Institute in Biel (Bern University of the Arts). In 2017, the Jurassienne received a cultural grant of 50,000 francs from the Leenaards Foundation and spent six months in New York in an artist residency.
Reread: Elisa Shua Dusapin, A Flower in New York (2018)
The National Book Award for Translated Literature recognizes a book published by an American publisher. Only the translated novel must have been published in the year of the award submission, not the original work. In the case of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel, her novel was published in French in 2016. The previous winners of the award are the Japanese Miri Yu in 2020, the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai in 2019 and the Japanese Yoko Tawada in 2018.
National Book Awards: five awards
The National Book Awards mainly recognize American authors. This year, the surrealist story “Hell of a Book” (in French: “l’Enfer d’un livre”) by writer Jason Mott won the National Book Award in the “fiction” category. American historian Tyia Miles won the same prize in the non-fictional category for her book “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake” trip of the bag of Ashley, a memory of black family ”). Browsing through archives, the writer and Harvard University professor traces the story of a black family through a bag that a slave woman passes on to her daughter as they are about to be sold separately.
In the “poetry” category, the prize was awarded to Martín Espada for “Floaters”. Through this collection of poems, his pen pays tribute to the migrants who drowned in the Rio Grande, between Mexico and the United States. In children’s literature, “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” by Malinda Lo won first prize. Each of the rewards is worth $ 10,000.
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