The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the shortlist for the 2023 National Translation Awards (NTA) in Prose and Poetry on Wednesday. The winner will be announced on November 11 at ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA46: The Place of Translation in Tucson, US. The winning translators will receive a $4,000 cash prize each.
This year’s jury comprises Natascha Bruce, Shelley Frisch, Jason Grunebaum, Sawad Hussain, and Lytton Smith.
B Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True (translated from the Tamil by Priyamvada Ramkumar) and Sheela Tomy’s Valli (translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil) are the two Indian books on the shortlist.
The jury said about Ramkumar’s translation, “...[she] deploys a playful turn of phrase; a masterful stretching of the English language; and an incisive awareness of the barriers imposed by the politics of caste, class and gender to lay bare disconcerting truths about human nature.”
“With expert skill, Jayasree Kalathil navigates the currents of Malayalam, the scriptless Paniya and Biblical quotations; demonstrates just how elastic the English language can be...,” said the jury about Kalathil’s translation of Valli.
The other books on the shortlist are Chinatown by Thuân, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý; I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To by Mikołaj Grynberg, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye; So Distant From My Life by Monique Ilboudo, translated from the French by Yarri Kamara; and Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki.
