2014 Hemingway Grant Winners [Spoiler Alert: We Made the List!]

Back in mid-December, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. announced the 2014 fall session winners of the Hemingway Prize publishing grant. Among the nine titles receiving support is Antoine Volodine’s Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, translated by J. T. Mahany and forthcoming late spring 2015 from Open Letter Books:

Like with Antoine Volodine’s other works (Minor Angels, We Monks & Soldiers), Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writers—those who practice “post-exoticism“—have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, a couple journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement.

With its explanations of several key “post-exoticist” terms that appear in Volodine’s other books, Lesson Eleven provides a crucial entryway into one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of literature.

Antoine Volodine is the author of dozens of books under a few different pseudonyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. These novels—several of which are available in English—articulate a post-exoticist universe filled with secrets, revolutionary writers, and spiders.

J. T. Mahany is a graduate of the University of Rochester’s MA in Literary Translation Studies program and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.

The Hemingway Grant allows publishers to receive financial help for the translation and publication of a French work into English. Grant beneficiaries are selected by the Book Department of the French Embassy in the United States. For more information on the Hemingway Grant, go to the embassy’s info page here.

Other winners for the fall session include Un Raskolnikoff by Emmanuel Bove (trans. Mitch Abidor, fortcoming 2015 from Red Dust), Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours by Aimé Césaire (trans. Clayton Eshleman, forthcoming 2016 from Wesleyan University), and Marseille Noir by Cédric Fabre (trans. David Ball and Nicole Ball, forthcoming 2015 from Akashic Books). The full list of fall session winners can be seen here. Congratulations to all!