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 Brother in Ice:

Brother in Ice
by Alicia Kopf
translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
(And Other Stories)

The end result of an artistic investigation into the North and South Poles, and those who sought to reach them, Brother in Ice is a multifaceted text that brings together nonfictional texts, photographs, meditations, and insights into the narrator’s brother, who sits along the autistic spectrum. At the heart of Kopf’s work is a question of certainty: we have no way of knowing whether any of the four explorers who went south reached the true South Pole—or only the place they believed to be the South Pole. Just as the poles themselves are in fact shifting, the narrator is in perpetual flux and Mara Faye Lethem’s translation illuminates her decenteredness, showing how it’s possible to exist in uncertainty.