Awards

• Short-listed for National Translation Awards in Poetry 2021 (United States)
• Winner of Academy of American Poet's Harold Morton Landon Translation Award 2021 (United States)
• Winner of The Hugo Award for Best Related Work 2021 (United States)

Overview

A GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR, AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the acclaimed novel The Mere Wife. Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf — and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment students around the world — there is a radical new verse interpretation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements never before translated into English. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye towards gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment — of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child — but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.

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9781911617822

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Reviews

Praise for The Mere Wife: 'There's not a false note in this retelling, which does the Beowulf poet and his spear-Danes proud.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus * Praise for The Mere Wife: 'Vivid and thrilling.' * The Daily Telegraph * Praise for Maria Dahvana Headley: 'Maria Dahvana Headley is a firecracker: she's whip-smart with a heart, and she writes like a dream.' -- Neil Gaiman '[A]s a poetic meditation on the poem, it's full of startlingly powerful and often raucously lovely language.' -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Review * 'Headley's Beowulf is kindred in spirit to The Mere Wife - highly conscious of gender and modernised to the hilt - but totally different in form. Instead of changing names or places, Headley sticks closely to the original Old English text while updating the vocabulary with flourishes of internet humour ... The feminism in Headley's translation is embedded in the texture and language of the poem itself rather than in its individual events or characters ... Her Beowulf is a tragicomic epic about the things men do to impress one another. It's as fierce an examination of masculine weakness as The Mere Wife was of feminine strength.' -- Jo Livingstone * Poetry Foundation * 'Headley brings a directness, intensity, and rhythm to her translation that I haven't seen before. This is what it must have felt like to sit in a mead hall and listen to a scop tell the tale. Other translations may be more scholarly, literal, or true to the poetic form of the original, but it's been a thousand years since Beowulf was this accessible or exciting.' -- Steve Thomas * The Fantasy Hive * 'Of the four translations I've read, Headley's is the most readable and engaging. She combines a modern poetry style with some of the hallmarks of Old English poetry, and the words practically sing off the page ... Headley's translation shows why it's vital to have women and people from diverse backgrounds translate texts.' -- Margaret Kingsbury * Buzzfeed * 'The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualises the tale.' -- Barbara VanDenburgh * USA Today * '[L]ively and vigorous ... I am delighted. I've never read a Beowulf that felt so immediate and so alive ... It's profane and funny and modern and archaic all at once, and its loose and unstructured verses are full of twisting, surprising kennings.' -- Constance Grady * Vox * 'Bold ... Electrifying.' -- Ron Charles * The Washington Post * 'I have a lot of things to say about Maria Dahvana Headley's new book, Beowulf ... The first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before ... I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this - this - version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing.' -- Jason Sheehan * NPR * '[The Mere Wife] includes some tantalising snippets of Beowulf as translated by Headley. Now we have the full version, and it is electrifying ... It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand ... With a Beowulf defiantly of and for this historical moment, Headley reclaims the poem for her audience as well as for herself.' -- Ruth Franklin * The New Yorker * 'An iconic work of early English literature comes in for up-to-the-minute treatment ... Headley's language and pacing keep perfect track with the events she describes ... [giving] the 3,182-line text immediacy without surrendering a bit of its grand poetry. Some purists may object to the small liberties Headley has taken with the text, but her version is altogether brilliant.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus Reviews * 'Maria Dahvana Headley has made an enthralling, scalding, contemporary epic; she combines newly-wrought ancient kennings with US street slang and lights up the women in the poem with unusual sympathy.' -- Marina Warner * New Statesman *

Praise for The Mere Wife: 'There's not a false note in this retelling, which does the Beowulf poet and his spear-Danes proud.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus * Praise for The Mere Wife: 'Vivid and thrilling.' * The Daily Telegraph * Praise for Maria Dahvana Headley: 'Maria Dahvana Headley is a firecracker: she's whip-smart with a heart, and she writes like a dream.' -- Neil Gaiman '[A]s a poetic meditation on the poem, it's full of startlingly powerful and often raucously lovely language.' -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Review * 'Headley's Beowulf is kindred in spirit to The Mere Wife - highly conscious of gender and modernised to the hilt - but totally different in form. Instead of changing names or places, Headley sticks closely to the original Old English text while updating the vocabulary with flourishes of internet humour ... The feminism in Headley's translation is embedded in the texture and language of the poem itself rather than in its individual events or characters ... Her Beowulf is a tragicomic epic about the things men do to impress one another. It's as fierce an examination of masculine weakness as The Mere Wife was of feminine strength.' -- Jo Livingstone * Poetry Foundation * 'Headley brings a directness, intensity, and rhythm to her translation that I haven't seen before. This is what it must have felt like to sit in a mead hall and listen to a scop tell the tale. Other translations may be more scholarly, literal, or true to the poetic form of the original, but it's been a thousand years since Beowulf was this accessible or exciting.' -- Steve Thomas * The Fantasy Hive * 'Of the four translations I've read, Headley's is the most readable and engaging. She combines a modern poetry style with some of the hallmarks of Old English poetry, and the words practically sing off the page ... Headley's translation shows why it's vital to have women and people from diverse backgrounds translate texts.' -- Margaret Kingsbury * Buzzfeed * 'The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualises the tale.' -- Barbara VanDenburgh * USA Today * '[L]ively and vigorous ... I am delighted. I've never read a Beowulf that felt so immediate and so alive ... It's profane and funny and modern and archaic all at once, and its loose and unstructured verses are full of twisting, surprising kennings.' -- Constance Grady * Vox * 'Bold ... Electrifying.' -- Ron Charles * The Washington Post * 'I have a lot of things to say about Maria Dahvana Headley's new book, Beowulf ... The first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before ... I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this - this - version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing.' -- Jason Sheehan * NPR * '[The Mere Wife] includes some tantalising snippets of Beowulf as translated by Headley. Now we have the full version, and it is electrifying ... It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand ... With a Beowulf defiantly of and for this historical moment, Headley reclaims the poem for her audience as well as for herself.' -- Ruth Franklin * The New Yorker * 'An iconic work of early English literature comes in for up-to-the-minute treatment ... Headley's language and pacing keep perfect track with the events she describes ... [giving] the 3,182-line text immediacy without surrendering a bit of its grand poetry. Some purists may object to the small liberties Headley has taken with the text, but her version is altogether brilliant.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus Reviews *

Author Information

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and editor, most recently of the novels The Mere Wife, Magonia, Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard she is the co-author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman she is the co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho and now lives in Brooklyn.

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