Join us as we count down to the ALTA44: Inflection Points 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 prose judges are Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Annie Janusch. This year’s judges for poetry are Sinan Antoon, Layla Benitez-James, and Sibelan Forrester.

The winning translators will receive a $2,500 cash prize each. The awards will be announced at ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA44: Inflection Points, which this year is being held jointly online and in-person in Tucson, AZ. The virtual awards ceremony will be aired on Saturday, October 16, at 5:00pm PT. To attend, register via the virtual conference platform (there is also a free ticket option that includes public events like this one.)

Join us as we shine the spotlight today on this NTA longlisted title, along with a citation penned by the judges:

Breasts and Eggs
By Mieko Kawakami
Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd
(Europa Editions)

Mieko Kawakami’s protean creativity takes the shape of a novel in Breasts and Eggs, a story of three women in contemporary Japan confronting the realities of their mortal bodies, relationships with others, and existence itself. Entertaining and philosophical at the same time, the translation by Sam Bett and David Boyd transmutes the source’s lively Osaka dialect into a sharp and frank narrative voice that follows the main characters’ journeys through the alien and alienating landscape that is our corporeal realities, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and vice-versa—much like in translation itself.