Até Que as Pedras Se Tornem Mais Leves Que a Água (Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water), by António Lobo Antunes, published in English by Yale Books last year, has been longlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award 2021.
The DUBLIN Literary Award is managed by Dublin City Council’s library service. Mairead Owens, Dublin City Librarian, announced that the 49 books eligible for the 2021 award were nominated by libraries in 69 cities and 30 countries worldwide; noting that 18 are titles in translation, spanning 10 languages, and 10 books are first novels.
In Até Que as Pedras Se Tornem Mais Leves Que a Água, award-winning author António Lobo Antunes returns to the subject of the Portuguese colonial war in Angola with a vigorous account of atrocity and vengeance. Drawing on his own bitter experience as a soldier stationed for twenty-seven months in Angola, Lobo Antunes tells the story of a young African boy who is brought to Portugal by one of the soldiers who destroyed the child’s village, and of the boy’s subsequent brutal murder of this adoptive father figure at a ritual pig killing.
"Deftly framing the events through an assembly of interwoven narratives and perspectives, this is one of Lobo Antunes’s most captivating and experimental books. It is also a timely consideration of the lingering wounds that remain from the conflict between European expansionism and its colonized victims who were forced to accept the norms of a supposedly superior culture."