14 titles have been longlisted for the sixth annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

The £1000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. The prize is generously supported in 2022 by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Warwick Institute of Engagement.

The prize is judged by Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett. Last year the prize was awarded to An Inventory of Losses (MacLehose Press), written by Judith Schalansky and translated from German by Jackie Smith.

This year’s longlist includes Argentinian and Georgian poetry, Japanese short stories and novels from Argentina, Catalonia, India and Syria. Three of the longlisted works are literary non-fiction: of these two offer a collective history of a place – an East Berlin suburb is portrayed through the stories told to the author when she was working as a chiropodist, and the metamorphosis of a Swedish village is recounted through a series of interviews with its people – and the third non-fiction title narrates the natural history, and emotional and cultural significance, of slime.

The 2022 competition received a total of 138 eligible entries representing 33 languages; this is the largest number of submissions made to the prize to date. The longlist covers 11 languages, with translations from Greek and Hindi represented for the first time in 2022. 12 publishers are represented, with the independent publisher Cassava Republic Press longlisted for their first submission to the prize while Fitzcarraldo Editions continues its unbroken run on the longlist since the prize was established in 2017.

This is the second time Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft have featured on the Women in Translation longlist. Translators Peter Graves, Mara Faye Lethem and Ginny Tapley Takemori also make their second appearance in 2022.

The judges said of the 2022 longlist:

“Our longlist this year showcases the enormous range and strength of translated writing by women from around the world. It covers not only a huge span of languages and cultures, from Hindi to Catalan, Arabic to Japanese, but a spectrum of genres that runs from supernatural stories to sensual verse, historical epic to micro-biological investigation. Some are relayed through multiple alternating voices; others by protagonists who reveal disquieting and haunting inner worlds of dreams, amnesia or elective silence. Fiction long and short, poetry, oral history and scientific narrative all find a place in this feast of literary creativity.

More than ever, this year's Warwick Prize for Women in Translation longlist defies any assumption that globalisation spells convergence with its exciting and often startling choice of literary diversity at the cutting edge of genre-bending experimentation and innovation.”

Prize coordinator, Dr Holly Langstaff of the University of Warwick’s School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, comments:

“Following a small dip in the number of submissions to the prize in 2021, we were very pleased to receive a record-breaking number of entries to this year’s prize from a diverse range of languages. Flemish, Maltese, Telugu and Ukrainian are represented on the list of submissions for the first time in 2022. We are looking forward to celebrating the work of the publishers and translators who continue to diversify the reading available to us in the UK and Ireland at our first in-person award ceremony since 2019.”

The shortlist for the prize will be published in mid-November. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at The Shard in London on Thursday 24 November.

More details are available at the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation webpage. We post regular updates on Facebook and Twitter. For further information about the prize, please contact the coordinators Chantal Wright and Holly Langstaff at womenintranslation@warwick.ac.uk.

The full list of longlisted titles, in alphabetical order, is as follows:

• Violaine Huisman, The Book of Mother, translated from French by Leslie Camhi (Little, Brown Book Group (Virago), 2021)
• Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021)
• Selva Almada, Brickmakers, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 2021)
• Katja Oskamp, Marzahn, Mon Amour, translated from German by Jo Heinrich (Peirene Press, 2022)
• Faïza Guène, Men Don’t Cry, translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone (Cassava Republic Press, 2021)
• Marit Kapla, Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, translated from Swedish by Peter Graves (Penguin Random House (Allen Lane), 2021)
• Samar Yazbek, Planet of Clay, translated from Arabic by Leri Price (World Editions, 2021)
• Susanne Wedlich, Slime: A Natural History, translated from German by Ayça Türkoğlu (Granta, 2021)
• Kyoko Nakajima, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian McCullough MacDonald (Sort of Books, 2021)
• Margarita Liberaki, Three Summers, translated from Greek by Karen Van Dyck (Penguin Random House (Viking), 2021)
• Diana Bellessi, To Love A Woman, translated from Spanish by Leo Boix (Poetry Translation Centre, 2022)
• Geetanjali Shree, Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell (Tilted Axis Press, 2021)
• Irene Solà, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Granta, 2022)
• Diana Anphimiadi, Why I No Longer Write Poems, translated from Georgian by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Jean Sprackland (Bloodaxe Books and Poetry Translation Centre, 2022)