Join us as we count down to ALTA42: Sight and Sound with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s prose judges are Bonnie Huie, Charlotte Mandell, and Jeffrey Zuckerman. This year’s judges for poetry are Anna Deeny Morales, Cole Heinowitz, and Sholeh Wolpe.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Prose NTA longlisted title Öraefi: The Wasteland: 

Öraefi: The Wasteland
by Ófeigur Sigurdsson
translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith
(Deep Vellum Publishing)

In this hallucinatory novel weaving Icelandic myth, expert storytelling, and little-known facts together, Sigurdsson creates a strange stream-of-consciousness hybrid being: a hilarious novel-myth-memoir-surreal poem, translated with breathtaking fluidity by Lytton Smith. Reading Öraefi feels like being immersed in someone else’s dream; it has a propulsive energy that pushes us forward as we marvel at the strange landscape around us. There’s no other novel quite like it.