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NTA Winner 2000
National Translation Award

The 2000 National Translation Award winners are Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin for their translation of Chu T’ien-wen’s Chinese novel Notes of a Desolate Man.

Howard Goldblatt is Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the Center for Asian Studies. Founding editor of the scholarly journal Modern Chinese Literature (now Modern Chinese Literature and Culture), he is the foremost translator of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the West. He has published English translations of more than thirty novels and story collections by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His most recent translations include Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, winner of the 2008 Man Asian Prize, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, recipient of the 2009 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, and Su Tong’s Boat of Redemption, winner of the 2010 Man Asian Prize. He has received two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2009, a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the editorial and advisory boards of a dozen literary and scholarly journals, in Asia and in the West, and has contributed essays and articles to The Washington Post, The Times of London, TIME Magazine, World Literature Today, and The Los Angeles Times to name a few.

Sylvia Li-chun Lin teaches modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and culture at the University of Notre Dame. A winner of the Liang Shih–chiu Literary Translation Prize, her essays and articles have been published by the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, World Literature Today, a special volume on literary journals and new culture in the 1910s, and several literary encyclopedias. She is currently working on a book-length, interdisciplinary manuscript, Commemorating National Trauma: The Ererba Incident and White Terror.

Notes of a Desolate Man has also been awarded the China Times Prize in 1994, Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, and Best Fiction of the Year by Los Angeles Times Book Review.

“Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin’s masterful translation brings Chu T’ien-wen’s lyrical and inventive pastiche of political, poetic, and sexual desire to the English-speaking world.” –- Columbia University Press