The NTA Countdown to ALTA44: Amora: Stories

The NTA Countdown to ALTA44: Amora: Stories

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:

Amora: Stories
By Natalia Borges Polesso
Translated from Portuguese by Julia Sanches
(Amazon Crossing)

Winner of multiple awards in its country of origin, Amora presents the full range of love between queer women with its candid revelations of explosive joy, stifling awkwardness, terrifying dread, and the endless negotiations with an often-hostile outside world. Never giving the stories a chance to veer into the maudlin, sordid, or well-trodden, Natalia Borges expertly chips away at the obfuscations surrounding her characters to present clear-eyed, lapidary portraits of relationships in a moment in time, a sharply honed aesthetic shared by her translator Julia Sanches, who brings each of the 33 stories into precision-focused English.