November 6, 2025—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the winners of the 2025 National Translation Awards (NTA) in Poetry and Prose today at an Awards Ceremony as part of ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA48: Visions and Versions, in Tucson, AZ. ALTA Vice President Corine Tachtiris conferred the prize on behalf of this year’s judges, who could not be present, on Daniel Owen, who read a short statement and selection from the winning text. 2025 marks the 27th year for the NTA, and the 11th year to award separate prizes in poetry and prose.

This year’s poetry judges are Conor Bracken, Dongshin Chang, and Rachel Galvin. The winner will receive a $4,000 cash prize.

Winner: 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry

Document Shredding Museum
By Afrizal Malna
Translated from Indonesian by Daniel Owen
World Poetry Books

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

Afrizal Malna’s poetry is unlike any other. In Indonesia, an adjective has been crafted from his first name—Afrizalian—to describe his stunning mix of apparently disjointed images in deceptively simple phrases that combine realism and absurdism, philosophy and playfulness. Written in a moment of questioning for Indonesia, right after the collapse of the Suharta regime and in the wake of the Padang earthquake, this collection enlivens and convulses with the ongoing collisions between self, city, and history. Full of surprises, Malna’s poems offer urgent existential meditations superbly translated into a kinetic, vibrant English by Daniel Owen.

About the winner

Daniel Owen is a poet, editor, and translator between Indonesian and English. His translations include Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum (World Poetry Books, 2024) and The Running Century (Reading Sideways Press, forthcoming 2025). Daniel edits and designs books and participates in many processes of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and is a PhD candidate in the South & Southeast Asian Studies department at UC Berkeley. Recent writing and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Long News, Works and Days, and Modern Poetry in Translation.

Image description: Daniel—a smiling middle-aged white man in a lilac collared shirt with a navy-blue v-neck sweater over it—stands outdoors beside a tall flowering shrub filled with small purplish-red blossoms.

Photo Credit: Diyah Noor

About the National Translation Awards

The National Translation Award is awarded annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. The NTA, which is administered by American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.

The 2026 National Translation Award submissions portal will be opened in January 2026.