Stone Upon Stone, Spectacle & Pigsty Win Best Translated Book Awards

Posted on May 16, 2012

Wieslaw Mysliwski's Stone Upon Stone, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston, has won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction. Kiwao Nomura's Spectacle & Pigsty, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander, took the top honor in the poetry category.

Stone Upon Stone is narrated by a Polish farmer determined to build a tomb for himself after a life of boozing, brawling, fighting in the resistance, serving as a marriage officer, and exaggerating his way through the twentieth century and the modernization of his small town. This is the second book published by Archipelago, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit press, to win the award.

Spectacle & Pigsty is described a collection of strange and wild poetry. The poems deal with sex and loss and memory by making unpredictable leaps of association.

Each winning book will receive $10,000 of prize money to be divided among the author and translators thanks to the support of Amazon.com. The annual award is given by the University of Rochester's Three Percent.