As we reach the first half of the year, we're delighted to see our authors strive with their books —and we couldn't be prouder, as we see many of the writers represented by the Pontas Agency in the long- and shorlists of important international prizes worldwide!
Two Pontas authors, Dolores Redondo and Federico Axat, are longlisted to The Daggers 2017, the awards organized by The Crime Writers Association, which started in 1955 and celebrate the best in crime writing published in the United Kingdom.
It's the second time Dolores Redondo is longlisted to the International Dagger award, the first in 2015, for her novel The Invisible Guardian, published by HarperCollins in the UK. This year, Dolores Redondo is longlisted yet again, for the second novel in her best-selling Baztan Trilogy, The Legacy of the Bones, also out with HarperCollins. Dolores Redondo is longlisted together with international writers such as Andrea Camilleri, Fred Vargas and Pierre Lemaitre.
This year, Kill The Next One by Federico Axat has been longlisted to the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger —an award given to "good thrillers, one that simply has to turn the pages”. Published by Text Publishing in the UK and by Mulholland in the US, Federico Axat is longlisted together with other writers such as Megan Abbott, Karin Slaughter and John Hart.
In the US, the English translation of Peruvian writer Claudia Salazar Jiménez's debut novel Blood of the Dawn has just been shortlisted to the 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, together with Charlotte Wood and Guillermo Saccomano, among others. Published by Deep Vellum in English, Blood of the Dawn won the Las Americas Prize for Fiction in 2014.
In Germany, Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila has just been shortlisted for a very important literary award, the Internationaler Literaturpreise – Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Published by Zsolnay in German, Fiston Mwanza Mujila is shortlisted alongside Han Kang, Alberto Barrera Tyszka and Amanda Lee Koe. The jury said: «Tram 83 is the rhapsodic novel by the 36-year-old Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila, who lives and teaches in Graz. It is a radical report on modern urban slum life in Africa. Fiston Mwanza Mujila chants, roars, whispers the sentences about everyday, modern dark life about the deeds of a boss crook and the unlikely salvation of a doomed poet. All this is told with merciless furor for which the translator-duo Katharina Meyer and Lena Müller have found a thrilling language.»
We are rooting for the four of them to get into the shortlist, or win the award they are nominated to. In any case, being part of these lists is already a huge deal!