The 2025 Cercador Prize goes to The Queen of Swords.

This week, the Cercador Prize announced Christina MacSweeney as the winner of the 2025 prize for her translation of Jazmina Barrera’s The Queen of Swords, out from Two Lines Press.

This is the third year of the Cercador Prize, which has further solidified itself as one of my favorite small prizes going because of its dual intentions: it is a monetary prize given to translators, and it is a prize judged entirely by independent booksellers. There’s no formal submission process, but instead the annual jury of booksellers put forth a shortlist and eventually determine the nominee based entirely on their own reading habits—so the prize is also not limited to any particular genre, but instead is open to everything from fiction to memoir to hybrid prose to poetry and beyond.

The jury had this to say about the book and its translation:

The Queen of Swords, presented here in a lyrical translation by Christina MacSweeney, astounded the committee. Jazmina Barrera’s study on Elena Garro, a maligned pioneer of magical realism, defies convention and embraces contradiction. This is a book of reversals and research, an unwaveringly brilliant portrait of a complex and undone life, captured in art and destruction, love and pain, faith and persecution.

MacSweeney, of course, is one of the preeminent translators working today. She has translated works by such authors as Elvira Navarro, Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to several anthologies of Latin American literature. In recent years, her translation of Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-Stitch was shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Institute Translation Prize, Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island was longlisted for a National Book Award, and Clyo Mendoza’s Fury was shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize. Jazmina Barrera is the author of six books in Spanish. The Queen of Swords is her fourth book translated by Christina MacSweeney and published by Two Lines Press, including Linea Nigra, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope.

This year’s Cercador jury included Javi Tapia of Third Place Books (Seattle, WA), Dylan McGonigle of Wayfinder Bookshop (Fairfax, CA), Beatriz Quiroz García of Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA), C. Rees of Alienated Majesty Books (Austin, TX), and prize chair Emily Tarr of Thank You Books (Birmingham, AL).