Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on The Impossible Fairy Tale, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose:

The Impossible Fairy Tale
by Han Yujoo
translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
(Graywolf Press)

The first of Han Yujoo’s books to be published in English is unlike anything else in its fearless experimentalism, working a nightmare narrative of childhood anomie and psychosis into a metafictional meditation on the meaning of storytelling. Janet Hong’s breathtakingly supple translation of the Korean wordplay achieves the impossible, again and again.