Spotlight | Highlights, Beyond Words Festival, 2023 | Institut Français du Royaume Uni

This year’s Beyond Words Festival featured a great line-up from across the Channel. Throughout the week, the  Institut Français du Royaume Uni in South Kensington, London, was bustling with people eager to see their favourite French authors in conversation with their British counterparts discussing not only their latest books, but many things words and ideas from France, past and present.

The first event I attended was A Gallic Evening with Muriel Barbery, Antoine Laurain and Jean-Baptiste Andrea, chaired by Viv Groskop. Gallic Books publish “the very best of what the French are actually reading.”  Over the past decade, they have brought over one hundred authors to the British reading public.

Continue reading Spotlight | Highlights, Beyond Words Festival, 2023 | Institut Français du Royaume Uni

Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Markiyan Kamysh, Stalking the Atomic City trs. Hanna Leliv & Reilly Costigan-Humes | Pushkin Press

Stalking the Atomic City by Markiyan Kamysh must be one of the strangest examples of tourist literature ever written. Its focus is about visits to ‘the Zone’: the radioactive Exclusion Zone around the devastated nuclear power plant at Chornobyl (the Ukrainian spelling of the place). Markiyan Kamysh describes his frequent illegal visits to the Zone during the 2010s, before the Russian invasion. At first, these sound unbelievable. Why would anyone want to crawl through barbed-wire fences, run from border guards and — in winter — suffer below freezing temperatures as they spent days and nights sleeping rough in decaying apartments and collapsing industrial machinery?

Continue reading Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Markiyan Kamysh, Stalking the Atomic City trs. Hanna Leliv & Reilly Costigan-Humes | Pushkin Press

Review | Rosa’s Bus, Fabrizio Silei, illus. Maurizio A. C. Quarello | Darf Publishers

Rosa’s Bus by Fabrizio Silei, who refers to himself as a “researcher of human stories and events”, is a perfect early learning book for children from the age of seven upwards. Beautifully illustrated by Maurizio A. C. Quarello, and sensitively translated from the Italian by Siân Williams, it is both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

What does Grandpa want to show Ben?
Why is Ben being told such a scary story about men in white hoods with eyeholes?
What happened to the dignified lady taken off the bus in handcuffs like a criminal?
Why did her one action and the protest that followed change history?

Continue reading Review | Rosa’s Bus, Fabrizio Silei, illus. Maurizio A. C. Quarello | Darf Publishers

Guest Feature | Lucy Popescu @lucyjpop | European Literature Days 2022

It was a delight to return, in person, to European Literature Days (ELit) a three-day literary festival, held in Krems, lower Austria. This year the theme was ‘Comedy and Crisis’. As Walter Grond, the festival’s founder and artistic director suggests: “Black humour often prevails where sheer hopelessness prevails, it is a fundamental human approach.”

Ukrainian writer, translator and journalist, Natalka Sniadanko opened the festival with a stirring address. Her debut novel, Collection of Passions, was published in 2001, and in 2013, her novel Frau Muller isn’t Disposed to Pay More was shortlisted for the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year award. Essays and stories of hers have appeared in English in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Brooklyn Rail, and Two Lines, translated by Jennifer Croft.  Continue reading Guest Feature | Lucy Popescu @lucyjpop | European Literature Days 2022

Review | IMPOSSIBLE, Erri De Luca trs. N. S. Thompson | Mountain Leopard Press

A prolific and acclaimed writer in his Italian homeland, Erri De Luca’s thought-provoking, philosophical investigation builds in suspense ending with an emotional bomb. Although a work of fiction, to what extent Impossible is inspired by his actual experiences of being sued for an alleged incitement to sabotage to the Lyon-Turin high speed train line on environmental grounds is open for debate. (De Luca was cleared on 19 October 2015 when a not-guilty verdict was pronounced.)

years of lead copyright france24A senator from the centre-left Democratic party supportive of the high speed train line, referred to De Luca as being a relic of the ‘years of lead’, the restless political period of the 1970s-‘80s when left-and-right-wing activists carried out numerous violent attacks, including the abduction and murder of former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro.

Continue reading Review | IMPOSSIBLE, Erri De Luca trs. N. S. Thompson | Mountain Leopard Press

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