November 6, 2025—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the winner of the 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize today at an Awards Ceremony as part of ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA48: Visions and Versions, in Tucson, AZ. Judge Thúy Đinh conferred the prize on Stine An, who read a short statement and selection from the winning text on behalf of the winner, Colin Leemarshall, who could not be in attendance. 2025 marks the sixteenth year for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.

This year’s judges are Hedgie Choi, Rahul Soni, and Thúy Đinh. The winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize.

Winner: 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

Just Like
By Lee Sumyeong
Translated from Korean by Colin Leemarshall
Black Ocean

This is what the judges had to say about this year’s winner:

Just Like is a fearless, ambitious collection that breaks language only to reassemble it into something new, strange, and exhilarating. Colin Leemarshall’s translation is fearless, reconstructing Lee Sumyeong’s syntactical components into an English that is as challenging as it is rewarding. Self-consciously fractured yet intuitively whole, these poems—and their translation—are both an homage to twentieth-century modernists and an endless essaying and expansion into the future. The result is a provocative encounter with language itself: “in protest against a thing totally unknowable and / raise arm / suddenly leaf, like tree striving to possess leaves.”

About the winner

Colin Leemarshall runs the print-on-demand press Erotoplasty Editions, which sells innovative and idiosyncratic books of poetry at cost price. His translation of Lee Sumyeong’s Just Like was published by Black Ocean in 2024. His reviews and critical writing have appeared in venues such as Chicago Review, Jacket2, Asymptote, and Blackbox Manifold. A book of visual poems, The Compleat Nidors, is imminent via Crater Press.

Image description: Colin, a white man in his early forties with glasses and light-brown, casually side-parted hair, stands in front of some street foliage. He is wearing a maroon t-shirt and smiling at the camera while holding his daughter (whose face is just out of shot).

About the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

The Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. This $10,000 prize is named for Lucien Stryk (1924-2013), an internationally acclaimed translator of Japanese and Chinese Zen poetry, renowned Zen poet, and former professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

The 2026 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize submissions portal will be opened in January 2026.