Jim Pascual Agustin Wins Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multi-Lingual Texts

PEN SA member Jim Pascual Agustin has been named the winner of the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation and Multi-lingual Texts. The Prize is managed by Antioch University through its online journal, Lunch Ticket.

Agustin was awarded the prize for “Danica Mae and other poems”, which he translated from Filipino. He shared the news on his blog, writing that “Danica Mae” was written “in response to the state-sanctioned killings that have summarily ended the lives of nearly 6,000 people as of this writing”. Read his blog in which he shares his concern about what is happening in the Phillippines.

Lunch Ticket‘s Special Guest Judge Mark Statman had the following to say about Agustin’s poems:

“There is something beautifully and sadly dense about these poems, which the poet, Jim Pascual Agustin, himself has translated. I found myself returning to them because I found them at once mysterious and ordinary, describing what I can only think of as tragic events (in “Danica Mae,” the actual death of one child, in “Standing in Tagatay,” the learned careless callousness in the life of another). The final short poem, “The Long and Brief History of the Bald Old Man and the Busted Pot,¨ presents the reader with a different kind of tragedy, a view of a long life at its unhappy end. Not easy to want to read, these poems nonetheless demand it. That demand is what I think I want most from a poem.”

Read Agustin’s winning poems on Lunch Ticket