NEAR DISTANCE longlisted for the NBCC 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
We’re thrilled to share that today, the National Book Critics Circle Award announced their longlist for the 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which includes Wendy H. Gabrielsen’s translation of Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg! View the full longlist on their website, here.
Grab a copy of Near Distance here!
The NBCC’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, launched in 2022, seeks to highlight the artistic merit of literature in translation and recognize translators’ valuable work, which expands and enriches American literary culture by bringing world literature to English-language readers. The prize honors the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States.
A finalists reading will be be on March 25, 2026, with the awards ceremony and reception on March 26.
Longlisted for the 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
For her entire life, Karin has fled anything and anyone that tries to possess her. Her job demands little, she mostly socializes with men she meets online, and she’s rarely in touch with Helene, her adult daughter. But when Helene’s marriage is threatened, she turns, uncharacteristically, to her mother for commiseration, and a long weekend away in London. As the two women embark on their uneasy companionship, Karin’s past, and the origins of her studied detachments, are cast in a new light, and she can no longer ignore their effects—on not only herself and her own relationships, but on her daughter’s as well.
An unnerving, closely observed study of character—and the choices we do and do not make—Near Distance introduces Hanna Stoltenberg as a writer of piercing insight and startling lucidity.
Wendy Harrison Gabrielsen moved to Oslo in 1987 after completing an MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. She has translated works of fiction as well as nonfiction, and in 2022 she was awarded the Wigeland Prize by the American-Scandinavian Foundation for an excerpt from her translation of Hanna Stoltenberg’s Near Distance.
Hanna Stoltenberg (born 1989) grew up in Oslo and studied English at the University of Bristol. She is a regular contributor to the Norwegian literary journal Vinduet and works as an editor at the Munch museum. Her first novel, Near Distance (Nada in Norwegian) was published in 2019. It won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas first book award and the NATT&DAG Oslo prize for best literary work. She is currently working on her second novel.
