Professor wins prestigious book award
Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez’s transformative novel about a young woman’s journey across the Mexico-U.S. border to find her brother, is the winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent, an international literary resource at the University of Rochester.
Herrera-Gutiérrez, an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, is the first Spanish-language writer to win the award for fiction. The book was translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman.
The competitive award, which is given annually, comes with a $10,000 prize for the author and translator.
“This novel … achieves a near perfect artistic convergence of translator and author, while giving readers an urgent account from today’s wall-building world.”
Jason Grunebaum, 2016 literary judge
“This novel of real pathos and unexpected displacement in self, place and language achieves a near perfect artistic convergence of translator and author, while giving readers an urgent account from today’s wall-building world,” says Jason Grunebaum, a judge in the 2016 competition.
Herrera-Gutiérrez is also the recent recipient of the Tulane School of Liberal Arts Young Mellon Research Award.
Dillman, who teaches Spanish at Emory University, will also translate Herrera-Gutiérrez’s novel The Transmigration of Bodies, from publisher And Other Stories.
