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:

Shameless
By Taslima Nasreen
Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha
(HarperCollins India)

How personal is social violence, and how social is personal violence? Boundary-blurring abounds in Taslima Nasreen’s Shameless, in whichthe author lends herself as a character in her exploration of how systemic powers manifest in supposedly private spaces, breaking down the walls between writer and reader to more immediately convey the nationalistic, misogynistic, and historical dynamics of societal exclusion and sexual assault. Form follows function with translator Arunava Sinha’s perfect blending of foreignization and domestication in a translation that feels tactile and alive in its intimacy, a translation that strives to transcend translation for a novel that strives to transcend the novel.