Jordan Stump's translation of The Barefoot Woman, a novel by Scholastique Mukasonga, is among the five finalists for this year's National Book Award in Translated Fiction. The Barefoot Woman is Mukaonga’s second memoir about the Rwandan genocide and focuses on the loss of her mother.
A professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who earned a PhD in French from the U of I in 1992, Stump has established himself as one of the premier literary translators from French, including translations of texts by Patrick Modiano (Nobel laureate 2014), Marie NDiaye, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.
Stump specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French literature and literary translation. He is the author of Naming and Unnaming: On Raymond Queneau and The Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction. He has also translated more than 25 works of French fiction into English, primarily contemporary novels by Éric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Marie NDiaye, Antoine Volodine, among others. His translation of Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.
Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956 and experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. Her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, won the 2014 French Voices Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017, her memoir Cockroaches was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose.