Summer in Nice on the Côte d’Azur. After a blistering two months without rain there’s a violent storm. Chantal abandons herself to the torrential rain and wades into the sea, “it’s pure joy to be swimming in both sea and rain at once, the rain falling in sheets, drenching my head.” She acquired an obsession with the sea from her mother whom she sees in her mind’s eye, “swimming, alone, unreachable, a minuscule speck against the blue immensity, an almost imperceptible dot, except in my own memory.”
Continue reading Review | Memories of Low Tide, Chantal Thomas | Book of the Week
Tag: books in translation
Guest Feature | Lucy Popescu @lucyjpop | European Literature Days 2019
This year, European Literature Days, one of my favourite literary festivals, was held in Krems, lower Austria, and posed the question “What defines a good life?” Austrian 
heavyweight, Robert Menasse (whose satirical novel, The Capital, is translated by Jamie Bulloch and published by MacLehose Press) gave the opening talk and we were introduced to an array of international writers, all with some deep connection to Europe.
Norwegian writer Ida Hagazi Hayer (her novel Trost – Solace – is yet to be published in English) was paired with Annelies Verbeke, a Flemish writer whose acclaimed Thirty Days (translated by Liz Waters) was published by World Editions in 2017. They both write about identity, love, the human need to connect and distrust of the “other”. Continue reading Guest Feature | Lucy Popescu @lucyjpop | European Literature Days 2019
Guest Feature | Lucy Popescu reviews three novels by Slovak authors on tour
Raising the Velvet Curtain is a festival of literature introducing a new generation of writers from Slovakia to British audiences (22 October – 28 November). Balla, Uršuľa Kovalyk and Ivana Dobrakovová are currently on tour, visiting Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge and London. The grand finale at Rich Mix in London’s Bethnal Green looks unmissable! Info & tickets HERE. Meantime, Lucy Popescu gives BookBlast’s armchair readers an exclusive flavour of what’s on offer in her three-novel roundup.
Big Love by Balla | Trs. Julia and Peter Sherwood | Jantar Publishing | Buy here
The Night Circus by Uršul’a Kovalyk | Trs. Julia and Peter Sherwood | Parthian Books | Buy here
Bellevue by Ivana Dobrakovová | Trs. Julia and Peter Sherwood | Jantar Publishing | Buy here
It is thirty years since the Velvet Revolution, so fitting that there is a surge of interest in literature from the region. The efforts of a two-translator team stand out. Julia and Peter Sherwood have worked tirelessly to find Slovak fiction a loyal English readership. They have been rewarded with the recent launch of three acclaimed books in their translation. Continue reading Guest Feature | Lucy Popescu reviews three novels by Slovak authors on tour
Interview | Charlotte Collins & Ruth Martin | Translator(s) of the Week
The Eighth Life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili translated by Ruth Martin & Charlotte Collins, is published by Scribe UK on 14 November, 2019. @the_germanist @cctranslates @ScribeUKbooks
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
RM: I grew up in Cornwall, and did a first degree in English and a PhD in German literature. I’ve been a full-time translator for about eight years now, working on both fiction and non-fiction titles.
CC: I did a degree in English Literature, then went to drama school. I worked in theatre on and off for quite a long time. A schools tour took me to Germany in 1996, where I lived for nine years. I’ve also worked as a radio journalist, and started translating full-time in 2010.
When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
RM: My dad used to read the Just So Stories to me when I was quite little; he did the voices of all the animals. I think he enjoyed it as much as I did. Reading aloud to children is one of the best things a parent can do, in my opinion. I loved anything by Roald Dahl, too – he had a big influence on my sense of humour. Saturday was library day in our house and I would read my allocation of books, then my brother’s, then I’d start sneaking books off my parents’ piles and reading them in a tree at the bottom of the garden where I wouldn’t be found for a couple of hours.
CC: I was obsessed with Peter Pan. I was convinced that if I thought beautiful enough thoughts I’d be able to fly, even without fairy dust. My grandmother had to have a serious talk with me because I kept launching myself down the stairs. I had wonderful books – The Chronicles of Narnia, Maria Gripe’s Hugo and Josephine series (translated by Paul Britten Austin), Tom’s Midnight Garden, (I used to play in that garden; a schoolfriend lived in Philippa Pearce’s old house.) I loved Andrew Lang’s coloured fairy books; Yellow and Violet were my favourites. There were a lot of time-slip books, a lot in which a lonely child finds a friend, a lot with absent fathers who miraculously return. I can’t remember who started me off on the Brontës, but I read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre when I was about eight and would nag my poor grandparents to take me to Haworth every summer. Francis Spufford’s memoir The Child that Books Built beautifully explores the way we’re shaped, as children, by the books we read, the way we escape into their worlds. Continue reading Interview | Charlotte Collins & Ruth Martin | Translator(s) of the Week
Interview | Philip Gwyn Jones, Scribe UK | Indie Publisher of the Week
Editor and publisher, Philip Gwyn Jones, has 25 years’ high-level experience at the heart of literary publishing in the UK. Most recently, he founded Portobello Books in 2004 and joined Scribe UK in 2014. He is a passionate and persuasive campaigner for great writing and has worked with both the conglomerates and the independents, as well as charities championing writing and writers, universities teaching the history and craft of writing and publishing, and literature festivals. @PGJpublishing @ScribeUKbooks
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My father read [and watched and listened to] only news, news, news. My mother was an aspirational reader and even more aspirational for her only child when he eventually arrived, and dutifully followed the advice in the women’s magazines of the 1960s-’70s from the likes of Kaye Webb about what books a child should be given to read. I ended up with a marvellous library of paperback kids’ books, mostly Puffins, from that time, which was largely ignored by my own children, and is now boxed up in the attic to be ignored by generations to come.
What was the book that made you fall in love with reading?
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which remains to me the greatest book of them all, containing, as it does, everything and its undoing and its explaining. Plus Asterix, in those puntastic Anthea Bell translations. Continue reading Interview | Philip Gwyn Jones, Scribe UK | Indie Publisher of the Week