Paper Lineages receives a PEN Translates Award
We are delighted to announce that Paper Lineages – Jennifer Shyue’s English translation of Anna Lidia Vega Serova’s short-story collection Estirpe de papel – has received a PEN Translates Award from English PEN.
The award, supported by Arts Council England, will help fund Jennifer’s translation of the collection, which Amaurea Press will publish in March 2027. It follows the PEN Translates Award received by Robin Munby’s translation of Anna Lidia’s novel Anima Fatua, published by Amaurea in 2025.
Originally published in Havana in 2012, Estirpe de papel brings together stories set predominantly in Cuba, alongside others shaped by Anna Lidia’s Russian and Soviet experiences. Moving fluidly between realism, satire and the surreal, the collection follows women and other marginalised characters as they negotiate love, work, art, identity and survival.
These are stories of fragile lives and improvised forms of belonging – of makeshift families, half-kept promises and tender acts of rebellion. Anna Lidia writes with a gaze that is at once unflinching and deeply humane. Her prose is precise and unsentimental, but alive to humour, desire and sudden moments of wonder. Taken together, the stories form a vivid mosaic of Cuban society and of the intimate worlds people construct in order to endure.
Anna Lidia Vega Serova was born in Leningrad to a Russian-Ukrainian mother and a Cuban father, and has lived permanently in Havana since 1989. Originally trained as a visual artist, she emerged as an important literary voice after winning Cuba’s Premio David in 1997 for her first short-story collection, Bad Painting. Her work encompasses fiction, poetry, painting and literary translation, and is marked by its distinctive exploration of identity, memory, sexuality and the frequently brutal textures of everyday life.
Paper Lineages continues Amaurea’s long-term collaboration with Anna Lidia. We have previously published the bilingual poetry and photography collection Un Jardín en Miniatura / A Miniature Garden, the English translation Sideways Glance, the PEN-supported novel Anima Fatua, and a new Spanish edition of her collection Imperio doméstico.
Jennifer Shyue has been translating Anna Lidia’s writing for nearly a decade. Several stories from the collection have already appeared in her translation in publications including The Common, New England Review, American Chordata and Inventory. Her previous translations include Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, winner of the American Literary Translators Association’s First Translation Prize. She has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, and has held residencies at MacDowell and the Anderson Center.
Jennifer recalls being immediately struck by Anna Lidia’s fiction when she first encountered it as a student:
“The pitiless sweep of her narrators’ gazes spares no one. I knew I wanted to translate these stories, each of which struck me in the chest in a visceral way.”
We are thrilled that the PEN Translates Award will help us bring this extraordinary collection to English-language readers for the first time. Over the coming months, we will be sharing more about the individual stories, Anna Lidia’s work and Jennifer’s translation process as we prepare for publication.
Paper Lineages, by Anna Lidia Vega Serova, translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue, will be published by Amaurea Press in March 2027.