Professor wins prestigious book award
June 09, 2016 1:45 PM
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Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Tulane School of Liberal Arts, is the winner of the Best Translated Book Award for fiction from Three Percent, an international literary resource at the University of Rochester. (Photo by Arielle Pentes)
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.