October 6, 2022—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize! This prize, which was inaugurated in 2009, recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. This year’s judges are Annelise Finegan, Soeun Seo, and Emily Jungmin Yoon.
This year’s winner was awarded at the Awards Ceremony held during ALTA’s 45th annual programming, ALTA45: Value(s). The ceremony included a focus on the 2022 shortlist, and the winner was featured in conversation with judge Emily Jungmin Yoon, followed by a short reading by the translator from the winning text. The announcement was made on October 6, 2022 on ALTA’s Eventbrite page; a recording of the ceremony will be viewable there. The winner will be awarded a $6,000 prize.
Winner: 2022 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
Cold Candies
By Lee Young-ju
Translated from Korean by Jae Kim
Black Ocean
This is what the judges had to say about the winner:
Lee Young-ju’s Cold Candies showcases a poetics of dying, rotting, and dreaming. In these surreal prose poems, the subjects fight through their deficiencies and strive to express themselves, though in vain: dolls discuss girlhood and girls talk like dolls, without moving their lips; a dead man underwater writes everything in great detail even if the writing simply vanishes. Lee’s grotesque and fantastical yet lucid imagery looks upon its decaying subjects with extraordinary tenderness. With his bold and decisive translation, Jae Kim invites you to come “rest a bit in this loving nightmare.”
About the winner
Jae Kim is a fiction writer and the translator of Cold Candies: Selected Poems of Lee Young-ju. His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. His writing can be found in Noon, Poetry, Granta, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.
[Image description: Jae, a Korean man with short black hair stands in front of a white wall, looking off to the side, wearing black, half-rim glasses and a textured t-shirt. The photograph is black-and-white. ]
The 2023 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize submissions portal will be opened in January 2023.