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:

Humus
By Fabienne Kanor
Translated from French by Lynn E. Palermo
(University of Virginia Press)

In 1774, fourteen African women escaped from the hold of a slave ship and performed a radical act of self-determination when they leaped overboard, rather than be taken into slavery. Humus takes up this historical footnote, breathing life and personhood into these unknown, nameless figures through a collection of imagined accounts. Lynn Palermo’s translation is notable for its attention to sound and language in voicing the interior lives of the women. In one passage, a body of water is described as retaining the warmth of the bodies that had bathed in it—a detail that speaks to the narrative feeling created by the translation, one capable of evoking the kinds of lives these women might have led.