MCLC: "Atlas" wins literary award

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: bonnie mcdougall <bonniesmcdougall at googlemail.com>
Subject: "Atlas" wins literary award
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Source: Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (8/24/13):
http://www.sfftawards.org/?p=664

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2013 Science Fiction and
Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012). There are two
categories: Long Form and Short Form. The jury has additionally elected to
award three honorable mentions in each category.

Long Form Winner
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated
from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author
(Columbia University Press)

Long Form Honorable Mentions
Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa, translated from the Japanese
by Michael Emmerich (Haikasoru)
Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak, translated from the Polish by Antonia
Lloyd-Jones (Penlight)
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated from the
Russian by Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press)

Short Form Winner
“Augusta Prima” by Karin Tidbeck translated from the Swedish by the author
(Jagannath: Stories, Cheeky Frawg)

Short Form Honorable Mentions
“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Zoran Vlahović, translated from the
Croatian by Tatjana Jambrišak, Goran Konvićni, and the author (Kontakt: An
Anthology of Croatian SF, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak, editors,
SFera)
“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese
by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65)
“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz, translated from the Hungarian by
the author (The Apex Book of World SF #2, Lavie Tidhar, editor, Apex Book
Company)

The winners were announced today at Liburnicon 2013
<http://liburnicon.org/en/>, held in Opatija, Croatia, over the weekend
August 23-25. The awards were announced by ARESFFT Board member Cheryl
Morgan and convention Guest of Honor, Jacqueline Carey. Zoran Vlahović was
in the audience.

The winning authors and their translators will each receive an inscribed
plaque and a cash prize of $350. Authors and translators of the honorable
mentions will receive certificates.

“Anyone who doubts the vitality of worldwide science fiction and fantasy,”
said Gary K. Wolfe, President of ARESFFT, “could do worse than to use this
impressive list of winners and honorable mentions as a reading list. The
breadth and variety of the translated works themselves, as well as their
venues of publication, attest to the valuable efforts of many to bring a
genuine international dimension to genres that have sometimes (and
sometimes accurately) been described as provincial in attitude.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a generous
donation bySociety for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science
Fiction <http://sf3.org/> (SF3). SF3 is the parent non-profit corporation
of Wiscon <http://wiscon.info/>, the feminist science fiction convention.

The jury for the awards was James & Kathryn Morrow (Chairs); Felice
Beneduce, Alexis Brooks de Vita, Stefan Ekman, Martha Hubbard, Ekaterina
Sedia, Kari Sperring, and Aishwarya Subramanian. Comments from the jury on
the chosen works follow.

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City
In praising Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Jurist Kari
Sperring called it a “hugely innovative, playful, intensely political,
accomplished book, and the best piece of fantastical
history/historiography I have ever read. The translation is excellent,
too: elegant, fluent, and lively. I applaud the preservation of Cantonese
pronunciation (a decision which is itself a political act). Moreover,
novel and translation are actively engaged with each other—the act of
translation has produced changes in the Chinese as well as the English
texts.”

“Disrupting the concept of the novel,” Jurist Alexis Brooks de Vita wrote
of Atlas, “irresistibly quotable, Dung Kai-cheung’s amazingly yearning
creation of short chapters toys with conceptions of place and being, with
feeling and mythmaking, centered in the fictional story of one of the most
painfully politicized cities still in existence in the world.”

For Jurist Aishwarya Subramanian, Atlas is a book that “clearly delights
in its own cleverness.” But beyond the breathtaking inventiveness, she
found the text “intensely political and engaged with the present – it’s
fifteen years old, but it still feels to me contemporary and relevant.”
Co-chair Kathryn Morrow discovered in Atlas “a masterwork on the nature of
translation itself. The prose is beautifully rendered into English, and
the author’s essential subject is the process by which myth, legend, and
fact translate themselves into human cultural artifacts.”

Jurist Martha Hubbard concluded, “This beautiful and elegiac book examines
the very nature of how knowledge is created … The language is at once
poetic and specific. The book is so moving, I would deeply love to own a
proper copy to keep and cherish.” . . .