Join us as we count down to the ALTA43: In Between awards ceremony with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose longlisted 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 judges for prose are Amaia Gabantxo, Emmanuel D. Harris II, and William Maynard Hutchins. This year’s judges for poetry are Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Katz, and Farid Matuk.

The awards ceremony will air on October 15, 2020 on ALTA’s Crowdcast page: you can register to attend the NTA in Prose announcement here, and the NTA in Poetry announcement here. Find the full list of longlisted titles here.

Today we’re shining the spotlight on NTA in Prose longlisted title God’s Wife:

God’s Wife
by Amanda Michalopoulou
translated from the Modern Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito
(Dalkey Archive Press)

Having lived for so long by the side of Him who created All from Nothing, I am finally creating something of my own. I am creating you.

Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife is a metaphysical, philosophical, postmodern novel. The question of existence is key to it: writing, and the idea of bringing oneself into being, are built and deconstructed in a narrative that examines notions of love, creation, femininity, and faith. The narrator is unreliable. Whoever this God/husband may be—this is irrelevant—what matters and confounds here is the nature of the wife’s tale itself: the atemporality of heaven makes for an amorphous, nonlinear narrative consisting of letters, myths, stretches of stream-of-consciousness, gossip, hallucinations. Like Penelope, God’s wife can only make and unmake, weave and unweave. And, in the process, make-write herself. Patricia Felisa Barbeito deftly reflects Michalopoulou’s evocative prose and playful, wandering moods.