October 26, 2024—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 ALTA First Translation Prize. Currently in its inaugural year, the ALTA First Translation Prize recognizes the work of emerging literary translators and their editors. This annual prize is open to all genres, and awards one debut literary translation from any other language into English published in the previous calendar year. This year’s judges are Esther Allen, Alexa Frank, and Urayoán Noel.
The inaugural winner was announced at the Awards Ceremony held during ALTA’s 47th annual conference, ALTA47: Voices in Translation, held in Milwaukee, WI from October 25-28, 2024. The ceremony, held on Saturday, October 26, included a spotlight on the 2024 shortlist. Presenting judge Esther Allen conferred the prize on Jennifer Shyue, who read a short statement and passage selected from the winning title. The winner will be awarded a $3,000 prize, with $2,000 bestowed to the translator and $1,000 to be shared by the editors, and a commemorative plaque.
Winner: 2024 ALTA First Translation Prize
The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu
By Augusto Higa Oshiro
Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue
Edited by Sarah Gale and Emma Raddatz
Archipelago Books
This is what the judges had to say about the winner:
Jennifer Shyue’s first move, on a 2019 Fulbright year in Peru, was to get her hands on a legendary work of Peruvian nikkei literature she’d read about: La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu. She soon acquired many more books by Augusto Higa Oshiro, and found herself sitting in a Lima yard with him and his small dog, talking about his work. The working-class Peruvian-Japanese author sought a language “capable of imposing itself on the breath” and Shyue’s translation lulls us with its measured calm, then leaves us gasping, swept headlong, spiraling and swirling, into Nakamatsu’s descent towards enlightenment, through the “many masks and countless layered veils [that] were hiding the intricate wounds in his consciousness.” Shyue’s sentences, intermingling Japanese and Spanish, are “elliptical, often anaphoric, building to a swaying rhythm that slips by like silk,” just as she describes Higa Oshiro’s prose. Her translation honors and enlarges a masterpiece, along with the writer and community that created it.
About the winning translator
Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her work has appeared most recently in The Margins, The New York Times, and Lit Hub, and has received support from English PEN, the Fulbright Program, the Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities, the National Endowment for the Arts, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s poetry collections A Blind Salmon and Vice-royal-ties and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu. She can be found at shyue.co.
Image description: Jennifer, an East Asian woman with black hair dyed orange in a bob, smiles at the camera against a soft-focus backdrop of a tree. She is wearing a sleeveless collared black-and-white gingham shirt. Photo credit: University of Iowa
About the winning editors
Sarah Gale is an Editor and Publicist at Archipelago Books, hailing from Portland, Maine. She has worked at Archipelago since 2019.
Image description: Sarah, a 28-year-old white woman with long straight hair and carrying a bag, turns back toward the camera smiling as she walks up a hill on West 116th Street in New York.
Emma Raddatz is an Editor and Development Associate at Archipelago Books, and the Director of its children’s imprint, Elsewhere Editions. She joined the press six years ago and has been selected to participate in editors’ fellowships in Montreal, Iceland, India, Seoul, Istanbul, Frankfurt, and Bologna. She co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival’s International Committee. She lives in Brooklyn.
Image description: Emma, a 28-year-old white woman with brown hair swept up in a bun, smiles against a backdrop of colorful bookshelves, in the Archipelago office.
The 2025 ALTA First Translation Prize submissions portal will be opened in January 2025.