Tag: books in translation

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 27 Sept., Waterstones, Nottingham, 6.30 p.m. | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Susan Curtis @istrosbooks @waterstonesNG

The fourth talk of the BookBlast® 10×10 tour, a nationwide celebration of independent publishing, features Istros Books, founded by translator Susan Curtis in 2011, to showcase the very best fiction and non-fiction from the Balkan region to a new audience of English speakers, through quality translation. Its authors include European prize winners, polemic journalists turned crime writers and social philosophers turned poets. Book Tickets

susan_curtis_kojakovic_bookblast_diary_interviewOn Thurs 27 Sept @waterstonesNG Susan Curtis will be leading a discussion with fellow translator, Christina Pribićević-Zorić, on The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust. They will be joined by Georgia de Chamberet who is currently translating The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez for Verso Books (2019).

Book extract: Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić, (October, 2018) translated by Susan Curtis and Celia Hawkesworth, consists of two stories that skilfully revisit the question of “doubles”, and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society. Meet the translator in person on Thurs 27 Sept. @istrosbooks Continue reading BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 27 Sept., Waterstones, Nottingham, 6.30 p.m. | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Susan Curtis @istrosbooks @waterstonesNG

Interview | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, translator

Meet Christina Pribićević-Zorić in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Nottingham 6.30 p.m. Thursday 27 SEPT. Theme: The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust. Book focus: The House of Remembering and Forgetting by Filip David (Serbia) and Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić (Croatia). With Susan Curtis, a translator and founding director of Istros Books, chair, translator Christina Pribićević-Zorić and Georgia de Chamberet (currently translating The Disappearance of Josef Mengele for Verso Books).

Tell us a little bit about yourself
I am from New York. My mother was Irish and my father was from the former Yugoslavia so I had a smattering of Serbo-Croatian when I went to Belgrade on a post-graduate scholarship. I went for a year and stayed for over twenty. Apart from translation, I have worked as a broadcaster and headed the Conference and Language Services Section at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. I now live in London.
 Continue reading Interview | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, translator

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Interview with Robert Elms, BBC Radio London | 1 September, 2018

I was delighted to be invited on to the Robert Elms show on Saturday to talk about The BookBlast® 10×10 Tour in association with Waterstones.  

Interview with Robert Elms, BBC Radio London 

A carnival of authors, poets, translators and #indiepubs will visit 9 major cities across England, 11 September-15 November, inspiring readers to immerse themselves in authentic and offbeat writing which adds value to the cultural landscape. The independent sector is the home of experimental writing, poetic innovation and world writing in translation. With these events BookBlast® aims to unite people in the spirit of friendship and exchange.

The BookBlast® 10×10 Tour catalogue can be viewed or downloaded HERE

Buy Tickets HERE

Check out our kickstarter campaign your support will make a huge difference for all the artists, publishers and arts organisations involved.

Pledge HERE

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Tues 11 Sept., Waterstones, Gower Street, W1 | Andrew Crumey, Margaret Jull Costa @dedalusbooks

The opening talk at 6.30 p.m. of the BookBlast® 10×10 tour, a nationwide celebration of bookblast eric lane dedalus booksindependent publishing, features Eric Lane, founder of Dedalus Books, in conversation with Andrew Crumey and Margaret Jull Costa, and has as its theme Independence: A Permanent Revolution @gowerst_books

Glasgow-born award-winning novelist, Andrew Crumey, lives in Newcastle and has had eight novels published by Dedalus. He has a PhD in theoretical physics and was literary editor of Scotland on Sunday for six years.  Continue reading BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Tues 11 Sept., Waterstones, Gower Street, W1 | Andrew Crumey, Margaret Jull Costa @dedalusbooks

Interview | TAHAR BEN JELLOUN: I am exiled in terms of language | BANIPAL magazine 2009

Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Goncourt among many others, and short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature, talks to Georgia de Chamberet about writing in French, immigration, exile, language, and fighting injustice.

An extract from the interview is reproduced below; the full interview was published in Banipal magazine No. 35 in 2009 and is available at banipal.co.uk

Banipal magazine is an independent literary magazine. It was begun in 1998 by two individuals who loved Arab literature and believed in promoting dialogue between different cultures by bringing this literature with the world through translation into English.

The Banipal Trust / Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation prize administered by the Translators Association 2018 judging panel is Pete Ayrton, Georgia de Chamberet, Fadia Faqir, Sophia Vasalou. 

oOo

How many hours a day do you write?
I write in the morning, on average for three hours, although I sometimes stay at my desk all that time and just write one phrase, it depends. The principle is that it’s a discipline and whatever happens I must stay in front of the page, or computer, and not give up. It’s a practice I have followed for 30 years.

Is the actual process of writing pleasurable – or is it a need?
Both. When I write novels and poetry it’s a pleasure naturally, but also a worry as I don’t know how it will turn out. And it’s a necessity since if I don’t write, I feel useless. Continue reading Interview | TAHAR BEN JELLOUN: I am exiled in terms of language | BANIPAL magazine 2009

Interview | Boyd Tonkin | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up? 
In suburban North London near the end of the Northern Line, in a small maternity home at the top of Hampstead Heath which later became a NHS nurses’ residence.

What sorts of books were in your family home? What did you read as a child?
Plenty, and an eclectic mix, but not entire walls or rooms of them. Always a fresh haul from the local library. My mother’s shelves had one of the very first Penguins: André Maurois’ Ariel (about Shelley). My father’s included rows of Pevsner’s Buildings of England, which always accompanied us on country walks and holidays. He knew German, went to German conversation classes until the end of life, so there was also some German literature in the original.
I vacuumed up the contents of the library (my first was Friern Barnet, not long ago saved from closure by a community campaign). I was a scattergun bookworm although I did early on develop a taste for classic science fiction (Verne to Bradbury). Also piles of books about cricket (again, always from the library). Somehow I fell in love with a collection picked up for a few pence from a jumble sale: Best Modern American Humour, in effect an anthology of the great New Yorker wits: Parker, Thurber, Benchley etc. I loved them then. Still love them now. Continue reading Interview | Boyd Tonkin | Author of the Week

Review | The 100 Best Novels in Translation, Boyd Tonkin | Book of the Week

“Since the ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, the champions of translation – such as Goethe and Madame de Staël – have urged its necessity, if only as an inferior substitute for the true polyglot’s command of several tongues. That case still needs to be made, especially in English, whose position as a planet-spanning lingua franca may trick native speakers into the delusion that their language, or any language, may encompass the whole world of thought and art.” – from the Introduction 

Great novels help us to understand what makes people tick and offer glimpses into the human psyche; they are as illuminating as psychology books. Translated fiction gives a whole added dimension, opening windows on to other worlds and ways of being and perceiving, which is ever more important now that Britain is being forced to re-evaluate its place in the world.   

In 2001 when he was literary editor of The Independent, Boyd Tonkin revived the Independent Foreign Fiction Award – first won in 1990 by Orhan Pamuk for The White Castle (trs. Victoria Holbrook). He was one of the five co-judges until 2015 when it merged with the Man Booker International Prize. The prize has not only been a huge boost for quality translations and translators, but has also paved the way for other prizes – the TA’s translation prizes which recognize outstanding translations from works in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish; the TA’s first translation prize; and the Warwick prize for women in translation.  Continue reading Review | The 100 Best Novels in Translation, Boyd Tonkin | Book of the Week

Interview | Robert Hyde, founder, Galileo Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mother was a voracious reader: she kept a diary of everything she had read since age about thirty. I reckon at least a book a week for fifty years +!  However love for books came equally from an inspired English teacher at Shrewsbury, F. McEachran who used to make us read T. S. Eliot out loud (as well as Goethe in German), and constantly wept with emotion when he read Shakespeare to us. Bless him.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
If you define “start” as post university, then yes.

Has your vision from when you started Galileo ten years ago changed?
Not really.  My interest has always been to make books which personally interest/inspire me rather than books which are just commercial. One hopes that one day the two will coincide.  But I’ve been in trade book publishing (prior to Galileo) long enough time to know that for the vast majority of us, profitability is the elusive butterfly.

What was the book that made you fall in love with reading?
I suppose the first book that I remember as being truly influential was Wind in the Willows, though “falling in love” may be too strong a term. Continue reading Interview | Robert Hyde, founder, Galileo Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Media Release | THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR in association with Waterstones

bookblast official logo ®THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR
A CELEBRATION OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING
11 SEPTEMBER – 15 NOVEMBER 2018

A Nationwide Festival of Independent Publishing!

A carnival of authors, poets, translators and publishers, under the banner of trailblazing agency BOOKBLAST® created by Georgia de Chamberet, will be travelling to major cities across England, showcasing some of the finest independent-spirited literature and poetry being published today.  

THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR, in association with Waterstones, will visit nine regions of England, celebrating risk-taking publishers who fill a unique niche in discovering talent. The tour connects London and the regions.

This tour is about extraordinary writing. Writing that surprises, amazes and intrigues. Writing that challenges, disrupts and demands. Writing that is from the margins of culture portraying areas of life that the traditionalist mainstream often ignores. The tour will inspire readers, existing and new, to explore what’s happening in different parts of the world now, and to immerse themselves in the unfamiliar. Audiences will encounter writers from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. With these events, BookBlast® aims to unite people in the spirit of friendship and exchange.

THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR launches in Waterstones Gower Street, located in the heart of Bloomsbury, London, followed by a series of themed talks, each one chaired by a small independent publisher, held in flagship regional branches of Waterstones over 9 weeks. It promises to be a hugely exhilarating celebration of the most electrifying prose and poetry being created today. Continue reading Media Release | THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR in association with Waterstones

BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | June 2018

This month’s top 10 reads take in calypso and a debut children’s book by Junot Díaz; Europe and the Middle East; murder most foul in the Australian Outback; tales of survival and hope; and life on the road.

Listing in alphabetical order according to publisher @carcanet @commapress @elandpublishing @gingkolibrary @hauspublishing @oneworldnews @peirenepress @peepaltreepress @pushkinpress

The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961-1993 by Anthony Burgess. Edited by Will Carr (Carcanet) buy here

“The general public does not care much for genius. Originality is dangerous, so is the naked truth . . . How can you explain to the great public that one of the most important things in the world is to invent a new way of saying things? But nobody cares about style, language, the power of the word. They prefer to hear about failure really being success, about a great writer killing himself at the early age (my age) of 62.” ― Anthony Burgess

a clockwork orange anthony burgessBest known for his novel, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. A novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic, he wrote over 60 books of fiction, non-fiction and autobiography, as well as classical music, plays, film scripts, essays and articles. Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world, among them the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, Playboy, and Le Monde. During his lifetime, he published two substantial collections of journalism, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986); a posthumous collection of occasional essays, One Man’s Chorus, was published in 1998. Continue reading BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | June 2018