The Cercador Prize announced this morning that Thomas Bunstead has won the 2024 prize for his translation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Book of All Loves.
Established last year, the Cercador Prize is an exciting entrant into the literary-prize sphere: recognizing works in translation published in the US, it is (to my knowledge) the only prize whose jury is made up entirely of independent booksellers. There’s no formal submission process, but instead the annual jury of booksellers put forth a shortlist and eventually determine the nominee based entirely on their own reading habits—so the prize is also not limited to any particular genre, but instead is open to everything from fiction to memoir to hybrid prose to poetry and beyond.
The jury had this to say about the book and its translation:
The Book of All Loves begins during a strange apocalypse, as two lovers parse the many facets of their love with gripping, categorical precision. The novel covers an enormous range of subjects—linguistics, metaphysics, geology, nature, poetry, artificial intelligence, deep time, philosophy—with a quality of thought that propels the reader to the book’s surprising conclusion. By no means a traditional novelist, Mallo is a writer for outsiders, his complex prose and style on the cutting edge of literary form, and Bunstead’s translation of The Book of All Loves balances the technical, the analytical, and the aesthetic. As Mallo’s only English-language translator since Nocilla Dream was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015 (and eventually brought to American readers in 2019 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, along with Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab), Bunstead’s commitment to the author is clear, and his vision for the text strikes an ideal harmony. Readers of all kinds will find lasting meaning in these pages. The Book of All Loves is a sheer pleasure, a text that reminded our committee why we read, and what wonderful discoveries are available to us in the trade of bookselling.
This year’s jury included Oscar Almonte-Espinal (Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books, Philadelphia, PA), Thu Doan (East Bay Booksellers, Oakland, CA), Riley Rennhack (Deep Vellum Books, Dallas, TX), Spencer Ruchti (Chair—Third Place Books, Seattle, WA), and Emily Tarr (Thank You Books, Birmingham, AL).
