Join us as we count down to the ALTA43: In Between 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 judges for prose are Amaia Gabantxo, Emmanuel D. Harris II, and William Maynard Hutchins. This year’s judges for poetry are Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Katz, and Farid Matuk.

The awards ceremony will air on October 15, 2020 on ALTA’s Crowdcast page: you can register to attend the NTA in Prose announcement here, and the NTA in Poetry announcement here. Find the full list of longlisted titles here.

Today we’re shining the spotlight on NTA in Prose longlisted title At Dusk:

At Dusk
by Hwang Sok-yong
translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
(Scribe Publications)

I have something for you, she said.

There’s a soft cadence to Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk, a plainness that defies its subject matter. Ordered around a tale of rags to riches, the novel follows architect Park Minwoo—once a slum-dweller—and a lost love, Cha Soona, whose recounting of their common memories makes Park Minwoo reconsider the nature of his own evolution: his successful architectural practice, and the changes it has effected in the Korean landscapes and in the lives of the inhabitants of those landscapes (himself included). The story grows more political as it moves, questioning the nature of progress and the evolution of Korean society itself. Sora Kim-Russell’s translation imbues its apparent narrative succinctness with something larger and more menacing.