Stone upon Stone (Kamień na kamieniu) by Polish writer Wiesław Myśliwski has received this year’s Best Translated Book Award in the United States.

The novel was published by Archipelago Books, a small non-profit publishing house from Brooklyn specializing in the literature from the non-English speaking countries, in a translation by Bill Johnston, a professor at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, and director of its Polish Study Center.

He is one of the most prominent translators of Polish literature into English and has translated works by the Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki, the novelists Bolesław Prus and Stefan Żeromski, the avant-garde playwright and prose writer Witold Gombrowicz as well as contemporary Polish authors, Andrzej Stasiuk and Magdalena Tulli.

Several years ago Bill Johnston received the ‘Found in Translation’ Award, sponsored jointly by the Polish Cultural Institutes in London and New York, the Kraków-based Polish Book Institute and W.A.B. Publishers of Warsaw (for New Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz).

Eighty year-old Wiesław Myśliwski is one of leading Polish novelists. Most of his works focus on the life in the countryside. “Stone upon Stone”, written in 1984, is his first novel translated into English.

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)