Hello, hello!
The second season of our weekly BookBlast Podcast series Bridging the Divide: Translation and the Art of Empathy went out in September. Our audience loved the first seven podcasts in the series so here’s the next eight for you to discover if you have not already done so!
The hosts, Georgia de Chamberet and Lucy Popescu, interview leading independent publishers, their award-winning or up-and-coming authors and highly creative translators filling a unique niche in showcasing inner and outer worlds, enriching our literary culture. Reviews of the books are featured in online journal, The BookBlast Diary.
So tune in and come on a literary adventure : it’s perfect to get you through lockdown 2.
Lars Mytting and his translator Deborah Dawkin, discuss The Bell in the Lake with Georgia de Chamberet.
Mytting’s superb, sweeping investigation of legend, superstition, and the effects of industrial and ideological change on a small, secluded village in rural Norway is the first in a hugely popular trilogy. Read the review by Rachel Goldblatt HERE
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Interview | Christopher MacLehose, publisher and founder of MacLehose Press, in conversation with Georgia de Chamberet
Christopher MacLehose brought WG Sebald, José Saramago, Haruki Murakami, Claudio Magris, Javier Marías, Jin Yong and many others to English-language readers. He is credited as having launched the bestselling genre of crime fiction in translation now known as “Nordic Noir by publishing Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson. Hear a rare interview with a consistently passionate advocate of fine literature in translation over many decades.
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Interview (in English) | Tahar Ben Jelloun, Moroccan award-winning author, discusses terror as a weapon, the roots of terrorism in France and much more besides
The Moroccan poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Tahar Ben Jelloun, is one of France’s most celebrated writers. He has written extensively about Moroccan culture, the immigrant experience, human rights, and sexual identity. An author who intervenes in politics, On Terrorism: Conversations with My Daughter (translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) is the third book in a series in which the previous titles are Racism and Islam explained. It takes the form of a semi-imagined dialogue between him and his daughter. Read the review HERE
Interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun in French by Georgia de Chamberet
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Listen now (in French) | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Interview | Tommy Wieringa, author of The Blessed Rita, and his translator Sam Garrett, discuss voices from the margins with Lucy Popescu
Wieringa’s novel The Death of Murat Idrissi was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019. In 2018 he won the Bookspot Literatuurprijs for his novel De heilige Rita, The Blessed Rita, published this year by Scribe UK. Hear Wieringa and his translator make a compelling and moving case for empathy with those living on the margins of society. Read the review by Lucy Popescu HERE
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Interview | Philip Gwyn Jones, formerly publisher at Scribe now heading up Picador (MacMillan)
Georgia de Chamberet interviews Philip Gwyn Jones who has extensive experience at the heart of literary publishing having started his career at the late, lamented Flamingo imprint at HarperCollins, then founding Portobello Books and merging it with Granta Books, moving on to Scribe, and since June this year, heading up the Picador imprint at Macmillan.
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Interview | Natasha Lehrer, translator of Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress, in conversation with Lucy Popescu
In The White Dress, Nathalie Léger tells the story of Pippa Bacca, a thirty-three-year-old Italian feminist performance artist who hitchhiked from Milan to Jerusalem wearing a white wedding dress to symbolise “marriage between different peoples and nations.”Through her intense examination of Bacca’s final work and of the often polarised public reaction to the role of women in art, Léger also addresses her own conflicted relationship with her elderly mother.” Read the review by Lucy Popescu HERE
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Interview | Goran Vojnovic, author of The Fig Tree and his translator Olivia Hellewell in conversation with Lucy Popescu
“In The Fig Tree, deftly translated by Olivia Hellewell, Goran Vojnović portrays three generations of a family whose lives are marked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its brutal aftermath. It is a remarkable portrait of a country’s fragmentation and a family’s fracture.” Read the review by Lucy Popescu HERE
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Interview | Beka Adamashvili, Georgian author of Bestseller (Dedalus Books) and his translator Tamara Japaridze discuss how well bestsellers travel and all things Georgian
As a reminder of what entertaining, inoffensive satire constitutes, pick up a copy of Bestseller by Georgian trailblazer, Beka Adamashvili, deftly translated by Tamar Japaridze, (Dedalus Books). Multiple allusions from literary classics are woven into his postmodern narrative as he sends up digimodernism and the shallowness of the desire for fame. Dante, Conan Doyle, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell and other literary heavyweights rebel against the author. Read the review HERE
If Soundcloud isn’t your thing, there are several other ways of subscribing to the podcasts depending on the device you are using.
Listen now | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Podbean
Season 1 : Bridging the Divide: Translation and the Art of Empathy | info is HERE
We’d be honoured if you would be up for sharing some of these interviews with your friends and family but hey, no pressure!
Sign up for FREE and don’t miss out on a unique opportunity to discover some brilliant publishers, writers and translators, and the real-life story behind their books. You’ll get greater meaning and depth when reading them.
