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 Among the Lost:

Among the Lost
by Emiliano Monge
translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
(Scribe Publications)

. . . drawing nearer, mothers to children, children to men, those who have been walking now for many days begin to sing their fears.

Among the Lost is a rich literary novel layered with echoes of Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. The novel balances the dark and macabre reality of Mexico’s human trafficking around the borderlands with migrant voices and stylistic turns thick with grim humor. The pace is fast—the novel takes place in one day—and yet the scope of it is epic, biblical. Its subject matter is topical, urgent, and necessary, and Monge’s execution is thrilling, combining the high lyricism of canonical tales with the earthy notes of collected migrants’ testimonies. Frank Wynne’s translation is beautiful, a labor of love filled with literary resonance.