Attila Bartis Winner of First Best Translated Book Award

For those who didn't attend the award ceremony in NYC yesterday, Tranquility by Attila Bartis was named our Best Translated Book of 2008. I think it's a great pick.

Reviews of Tranquility:

The Quarterly Conversation

Hungarian Literature Online

Three Percent

The Los Angeles Times

Short bio of Attila Bartis:

Attila Bartis is the author of Tranquility, winner of the inaugural Best Translated Book Award.
Tranquility is a claustrophobic, dark first-person novel that deals with a contemporary Hungary still coming to grips with the fall of Communism. Tranquility was translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein and published in English in 2008 by Archipelago Books. It received the Tibor Déry Prize and the Sandor Márai Prize in 2001.

Bartis was born in Transylvania in 1968. His family moved to Budapest in 1984 when his father, Ferenc Bartis, was exiled from Romania. His first novel, 1995's A seta ("The Walk") has been called an "ambitious debut" with "many eclectic sideways glances at literary history." Bartis worked on it for six years, and the book deals with Romania under Ceausescu.

Bartis is also the author of A kékloý pára ("Bluish Mist") a collection of short stories inspired by his childhood memories of Romania. The stories have been described as "expressed in accurate, measured and elegant sentences, balanced on the edge of reality and grotesque mystery."

Bartis's most recent work is a collection of 12 literary essays entitled A Lázár apokrife ("Lazarus's Apocrypha"). Published in 2005, the essays have been described as "meditations on everyday life and writing; travelogues, which are mostly haunting personal memories and experiences which are shaped into twelve 'true stories about God.'"

Tranquility was adapted into a film by Róbert Alföldi in 2008.