This year’s Korean Literature Translation Awards went to French, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese translations of Korean novels, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea announced Wednesday.

“This year, the European-language translations excelled in quality, were released through prominent local publishers, and received praise from the local media,” said poet and head of the awards panel Moon Jung-hee in a statement on the reasons behind the selection. 

Three out of the four recipients were European-language translations, and all four selected works were translations of novels.

On the dominance of novels, Moon said: “Two works of poetry translation made it to the finals, but they were unfortunately dropped due to various factors.”

This year’s winners are Lee Tae-yeon and the late Genevieve Roux-Faucard, who co-translated Han Kang’s “Breath Fighting” into French (“Pars, le vent se leve”); Kwon Eun-hee and Sung Cho-rim, who co-translated Bae Soo-ah’s “Sunday Sukiyaki Restaurant” into Spanish (“El Restaurante de Sukiyaki”); Andrea De Benedittis, who translated Kim Young-ha’s “I Have a Right to Destroy Myself” into Italian (“Ho Il Diritto di Distruggermi”); and Vu Kim Ngan, who translated Jeong Yu-jeong’s “Seven Years of Darkness” into Vietnamese (“7 nam bong toi”).