‘Ghost Town’ translator wins Italian book award

Italian translator Silvia Pozzi has won a Pisa Book Translation Award for her translation of Ghost Town (鬼地方), a novel by Taiwanese author Kevin Chen (陳思宏).

The Italian edition, titled Citta fantasma, was recognized at a ceremony held Friday at the Palazzo della Sapienza in Rome as part of the Pisa Book Festival, an annual literary event that brings together authors, publishers and readers.

The novel is set in Yongjing, a town in Changhua County, and follows a man who returns home after serving a prison sentence in Germany for killing his boyfriend. Through his return and interactions with his family, the novel explores family trauma, hometown ties and the impact of Taiwan’s past.

The cover of the Italian edition of Ghost Town, a novel by Taiwanese author Kevin Chen, is pictured in an undated photograph.

Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Culture

In a news release, Minister of Culture Li Yuan (李遠) said Chen’s distinctive writing style gives local history a magical, dark and melancholic character, making his work appealing to international publishers.

Pozzi is a professor of Chinese and Southeast Asian languages and literature at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Besides Ghost Town, she has translated Chiu Miao-chin’s (邱妙津) Last Words from Montmartre (蒙馬特遺書) and Wu Ming-yi’s (吳明益) The Man with the Compound Eyes (複眼人) into Italian. She has also been commissioned by an Italian publisher to translate Yang Shuang-tzu’s Taiwan Travelogue (台灣漫遊錄), which won the International Booker Prize earlier this year.

Ghost Town has received international recognition, including multiple mentions in The New York Times Book Review in 2022 and a place on the 2023 PEN Translation Prize longlist. Its translation rights have been sold in more than 10 languages.