Open Letter Books Newsletter: October 2025

Things move fast during awards season.

Just a couple weeks ago, the 2025 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize Longlist was announced and included one of our books: Of Beasts and Fowls by Pilar Adón & Katie Whittemore. This is a great honor for a great book, and I highly recommended listening to this podcast, recorded during Pilar’s U.S. tour last fall, to get a better sense of what makes this lush, wondrous book about a cult/non-cult, about signs and symbols, about finding yourself, and about water.

Well, I waited a week too long to write a celebratory post about why Of Beasts and Fowls deserves to win the QSSI Translation Prize, about Adón & Whittemore’s next book, The Mayflies, about the last time Whittemore was a finalist (for Wolfskin by Lara Moreno), about last year’s winner, Heather Cleary and her Sergio Chejfec translations for Open Letter, etc., because the shortlist was announced yesterday and our book isn’t on it.

[No regrets though! Last Tuesday was the official pub date for To Essay by Rusana Bardarska, Christopher Buxton & Zornitsa Hristova, which is also a fantastic, rich, engrossing book and one that I highly encourage you to check out.]

Anyway, the five finalists for this year’s QSSI Translation Prize are:

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays by Pedro Lemebel, translated by Gwendolyn Harper (Penguin Classics)

Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell (Penguin Books)

Hungry for What by María Bastarós, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn (Daunt BooksPublishing)

Living Things by Munir Hachemi, translated by Julia Sanches (Coach House Books)

Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman (Graywolf Press)

Congrats to all!

This got me to thinking though about all the Spanish-language works that Open Letter has published over its 18-year history, and oh boy are there a lot of them! Of the ~180 titles we’ve published to date, fifty are translated from Spanish. (And all but one are still available.) That’s a hell of a commitment, and with three more coming in 2026 (The City by Lara Moreno & Alice Banks & Katie Whittemore, The Family by Sara Mesa & Katie Whittemore, and Mantra by Rodrido Fresán & Will Vanderhyden), Open Letter must be one of the most prolific publishers of Spanish-language literature today.

Anyway, just for fun, I put together this list of all our Spanish-language works, sorted