November 6, 2025—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the winner of the 2025 ALTA First Translation Prize today at an Awards Ceremony as part of ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA48: Visions and Versions, in Tucson, AZ. Judge CJ Evans conferred the prize on Lin King, who read a short statement and selection from the winning text. 2025 marks the second year for the ALTA First Translation Prize.

This year’s judges are CJ Evans, David M. Smith, and Jiyoon Lee. The winner will receive a $3,000 cash prize, with $2,000 bestowed on the translator and $1,000 on the editor.

Winner: 2025 ALTA First Translation Prize

Taiwan Travelogue
By Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
Translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Edited by Yuka Igarashi
Graywolf Press

This is what the judges had to say about this year’s winner: 

Taiwan Travelogue is a complex, multivocal meditation on language, power, and queer desire. In this dazzling meta novel, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ crafts a fictional translation within a translation: a memoir by a Japanese writer in 1930s colonial Taiwan, filtered through Mandarin Chinese, which we in turn receive in English in Lin King’s translation. King navigates the novel’s shifting linguistic and historical registers with precision and flair, preserving its layered complexity while bringing its sensuous prose and intellectual play into English. This is a rare and remarkable act of translation, one that reflects upon itself as a translation.

About the winner

Lin King 金翎 is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. Translations include the graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin (Levine Querido) and the novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi (Graywolf), which won the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature. Forthcoming publications include A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven by Lee Chia-Ying (Doubleday UK, Riverhead US). Her own fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, and Joyland, among others, and her debut novel is forthcoming from Henry Holt.

Image description: Lin, an East Asian woman with medium-length black hair, is smiling in front of a red brick wall and stone balustrades. She wears a gray-green shirt that is collared and sleeveless.

Photo Credit: Annette An-Jen Liu

 

About the winning editor

Yuka Igarashi is an executive editor at Graywolf Press. Before joining Graywolf in 2021, she was editor-in-chief of Soft Skull Press, founder and editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine, founding editor of the Best Debut Short Stories anthology series, and the managing editor of Granta magazine.

Image description: Yuka, a Japanese woman with bangs and straight hair past her shoulders, is smiling slightly at the camera standing in front of abstract wire sculptures in soft focus over her right shoulder. She wears a black top and black jacket.

About the ALTA First Translation Prize

The ALTA First Translation Prize, inaugurated in 2024, recognizes the work of emerging literary translators and their editors. This $3,000 prize ($2,000 bestowed to the translator and $1,000 to the editor) is open to all genres, and awards one debut literary translation from any other language into English published in the previous calendar year. Translators based anywhere in the world and translations published anywhere in the world are eligible.

The 2026 ALTA First Translation Prize submissions portal will be opened in January 2026.