It’s also possible, when you do pick up a book in translation, to focus mostly on translation from Europe. Still, it’s possible to get caught in a pattern of reading mostly books written in English. With the International Booker Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and other great translation prizes, it’s easy to discover a new book originally written in another language.

I can think of many wonderful small presses that specialize in translated books, and the major publishing houses put out great ones as well. Watch an interview with Scholastique Mukasonga at the Words Beyond Festival of French Literature.It’s a great time to be a reader of books in translation. Read Publishers Weekly’s article on how Jill Schoolman discovered Mukasonga and Our Lady of the Nile here. Read an interview with Mukasonga in the New Welsh Review here.Ī mention of Our Lady of the Nile on Three Percent’s weblog. Our Lady of the Nile has received the Grand Prix of the French Voices Award. Read an interview with Mukasonga about the challenges of writing, memory, and history in Warscapes Magazine. Read Scholastique Mukasonga’s stunning essay on writing here. Watch a video of Scholastique Mukasonga’s discussion about winning the P rix Renaudot 2012 for Our Lady of the Nile. Read the first chapter of Our Lady of the Nile on The Brooklyn Rail.Īn excerpt from the novel is available to read at Tin House. Visit author Scholastique Mukasonga’s official website here. Named one of the “ Best Books of 2014” by Publisher’s Weekly.

Our Lady of the Nile has been shortlisted for the 2016 Dublin International Literary Award! See the full list here.

With a masterful prose that is at once subtle and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society hurtling toward horror. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, prejudice, and persecution. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we watch as these girls try on their parents’ preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country’s mounting racial tensions and violence. and to escape the dangers of the outside world. Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens. In her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, originally published in 2012 by Gallimard, Scholastique Mukasonga drops us into an elite Catholic boarding school for young women perched on the ridge of the Nile. Named a Best Book of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly Shortlisted for the 2015 FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award Shortlisted for the 2016 International DUBLIN Literary Award

Waterwords by Melanie L. Mauthner