Noviolet Bulawayo’s award-winning debut novel We Need New Names is available in Italian as C‘è Bisogno Di Nuovi Nomi.
In 2011, Noviolet Bulawayo won the Caine Prize for African Writing for the short story Hitting Budapest. Two years later, the Zimbabwean added “novelist” to her profile as she gave us We Need New Names which came with the following blurb;
Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo’s belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.
But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America’s famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her–from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee–while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.
The novel was received well with shortlists on the Man Booker Prize (2013), the Guardian First Book Award (2013), and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award (2013). It also won the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature (2013), and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut work of fiction.
When it was announced that the novelist was going to be doing the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study Writing Fellowships in late October, this blogger started fiddling about online and found something pretty cool. Her debut novel has been available to readers in Italian since 2014 with translation by Malanga E. and publishing by Bompiani under the title C‘è Bisogno Di Nuovi Nomi.
If you can read in Italian, you can get a copy of the book here.
One reply on “Noviolet Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names” available in Italian.”
[…] their literature best in that language. The translation was done by E Malanga, who incidentally also did the translation for Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, and was published by La nave di Teseo, one of the most respected in Italy, on July 4, […]