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 shortlisted title Anniversaries:

Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl
by Uwe Johnson
translated from the German by Damion Searls
(New York Review Books)

A monumental work in every sense of the word, the two-volume Anniversaries comprises a chapter for every day of a year. Told from the point of view of a German single mother living in New York City in the late 1960s, the book weaves together past (Nazi Germany), present (the Vietnam War, racial unrest), and the impending future (anticipating the sexual revolution of the 1970s) in a remarkable way:  Johnson’s prose—sensuous, attentive, compassionate—draws us in and holds us there. Reading Anniversaries becomes a pleasurable experience, in no small part thanks to Damion Searls’s masterful translation.