27/10/2024
Congratuations to our translators Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell (translators of Alien by Sun Wei-min), for being the winners of 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize for their translation of (Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen). Wen-chi Li serves as one of our editors for the World Literature from Taiwan book series.
Announcing the winner of the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize: DECAPITATED POETRY by Ko-hua Chen, translated from Chinese by Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell, published by Seagull Books! https://bit.ly/40lYI8u
Starting in 2009, the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. Stryk was an internationally acclaimed translator of Japanese and Chinese Zen poetry, a renowned Zen poet himself, and a former professor of English at Northern Illinois University. This year’s judges are Eric Hyett, Archana Madhavan, and Shriram Sivaramakrishnan.
This is what the judges had to say about the winner:
Decapitated Poetry is the glorious new collection of selected works by Ko-hua Chen, Taiwan’s first openly-gay poet. Chen’s poetry achieves transcendence through a daring combination of depth, revelation and lightheartedness. Playfully filthy at times, gently mocking at others, Chen’s humor and vulnerability come through in poems like “Song of Dumbbells,” “The Necessity of A**l Sex,” “Twelve Love Poems for an Android.” Co-translators Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell selected these poems from Chen’s prolific lifetime of work, and created a lyrical English-language voice that is approachable and welcoming like the poetry itself, favoring deceptively-simple language and a colloquial tone.
