October 26, 2024—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Starting in 2009, the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. Stryk was an internationally acclaimed translator of Japanese and Chinese Zen poetry, a renowned Zen poet himself, and a former professor of English at Northern Illinois University. This year’s judges are Eric Hyett, Archana Madhavan, and Shriram Sivaramakrishnan.
This year’s 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. ALTA Vice President Corine Tachtiris conferred the prize, as this year’s judges could could not be present, on Steven Bradbury, who accepted the prize on the winners’ behalf as they could not be present at the ceremony. He read a short statement from the winners, along with a reading selected from the winning title. The winners will share a $6,000 prize and receive a commemorative plaque each.
Winner: 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
Decapitated Poetry
By Ko-hua Chen
Translated from Chinese by Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell
Seagull Books
This is what the judges had to say about the winner:
Decapitated Poetry is the glorious new collection of selected works by Ko-hua Chen, Taiwan’s first openly-gay poet. Chen’s poetry achieves transcendence through a daring combination of depth, revelation and lightheartedness. Playfully filthy at times, gently mocking at others, Chen’s humor and vulnerability come through in poems like “Song of Dumbbells,” “The Necessity of Anal Sex,” “Twelve Love Poems for an Android.” Co-translators Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell selected these poems from Chen’s prolific lifetime of work, and created a lyrical English-language voice that is approachable and welcoming like the poetry itself, favoring deceptively-simple language and a colloquial tone.
About the winners
Colin Bramwell is a writer from the north of Scotland. He studied at Edinburgh, McGill and Oxford, and holds a doctorate in creative writing from St Andrews. He writes in and translates into English and Scots. His poems have been published in Poetry Review, PN Review, The London Magazine, The Rialto, Poetry Scotland, Irish Pages, New Writing Scotland, The Scotsman and Magma. Fower Pessoas, a volume of Fernando Pessoa versions in Scots, will be published in the UK and USA by Carcanet in early spring of 2025.
Image description: A smiling man with medium-length hair and a full beard, wearing a shirt with red checks on a white background. Photo credit: Tod Richter
Wen-chi Li holds a post as the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow at the University of Oxford, after completing Susan Manning Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and receiving his PhD in Sinology from the University of Zurich. He has co-edited the Chinese book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBTQ (Dark Eyes, 2019) and the volume of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022). He and Colin Bramwell received first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition for translating Yang Mu’s poetry. He is a co-founder of the “World Literature from Taiwan” series with Balestier Press.
Image description: Wen-chi Li holds the book Taiwan: A New History.
The 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize submissions portal will be opened in January 2025.