Tag: what writers read

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 | Ian Holding | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and have lived here all my life.

What sorts of books were in your family home?
As a family we belonged to a small municipal library up the road and every second Saturday, religiously, we would go to the library and browse books, make selections. I think this is where my love of books and reading was fostered, really. At home I always remember there being a great deal of Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl and Gerald Durrell, amongst others; some would have been library books; some we owned (or where perhaps “former” library books!). Plus there was this whole other unreachable top shelf of alluring paperbacks I suspected at the time were not intended for the eyes of a young, inquisitive boy. When I was finally old enough to reach that shelf, its contents were actually, on the face of it, quite disappointing. Except there was a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but I was such a pathetic loser as a kid I could never seem to find the bits that made it so notorious! Continue reading Interview | Ian Holding | Author of the Week

Interview | Bridget Blankley | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Nottingham, as were my parents, but I grew up in Southern Nigeria. When we came back to the UK we moved around a bit before settling in Essex. I stayed there until I had my children.

What sorts of books were in your family home?
There was a real spread of genres. My sister read historical fiction, lots of it, we were always battling for space on our joint bookshelves. My Dad liked humour and detective fiction, the Father Brown Stories, Simenon’s Maigret, and Jeeves and Wooster. There were also quite a lot of autobiographies in the house, I’m not sure who brought them, probably mum, but we all read them.
I was lucky as a child, there was no limit on what we could read. If it was in the house anyone could read it. My dad believed that if it was too advanced for us we would lose interest in the book and put it back on the shelf. I think it probably worked. I never felt I had to finish a book that I wasn’t enjoying, but I never felt that any books were beyond me.

Continue reading Interview | Bridget Blankley | Author of the Week

Interview | Selvedin Avdić | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Zenica.* I grew up there, inside a triangle consisting of a steelworks, a mine and a prison.
*[Bosnia and Herzegovina. ed.]

What sorts of books were in your family home?
We did not have a big library, my father preferred machines to books. But there were several nice books – among them the children’s book, Timur and his Squad, by Arkady Gaidar. I was so obsessed with the book that I named my son Timur years later. I read it again recently and it’s not as good as I thought in my childhood. Close to our house was a city library where I went almost every day. My neighbour was an actor, the first to play Hamlet in my town. He once interrupted me on my return from the library and advised me not to read randomly, but to choose a writer, read everything s/he wrote and then move on to another. That advice seemed crazy even then. I mostly avoided this neighbour afterwards.
 Continue reading Interview | Selvedin Avdić | Author of the Week

BookBlast® News | Where have all the intellectuals gone? | Librairie La Page 20.3.2018

Intellectuals have never had a more important contribution to make to culture and to democracy than now, in our age of post truth politics, trumpery and newspeak. We need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other in more profound ways than tweeting soundbites.

Intellectuals are a rare breed however there have been a number of sightings in past months. Some of these controversial individuals are likely to be found in South Kensington next Tuesday 20 March at 6.30pm since Pascal Bacqué will be at Librairie La Page, 7 Harrington Road, London, SW7 discussing his epic and hallucinatory novel just published by Massot éditions.

winston churchill in his daimlerOf War, Mankind and Planet Earth is a madly ambitious, hypnotic 440 page novel; the first of five volumes. Fifteen years of research and five very different drafts took Pascal Bacqué on a journey through his life and that of the world. Taking in 6000 years of history, he travels through the centuries to create a pot pourri of people, places and events, telling the never-ending story of war through the ages.

« You can get totally immersed in this book, play mind games, dream, admire and disagree . . . It is a book to be read aloud, a book on which to meditate, to be listened to with the third ear, to be read in one sitting, backwards, fast, or on edge of your chair . . . It is an extraordinary book, an addictive narrative which cannot be put down and which, once read, possesses you. » Bernard-Henri Lévy

World War Two and the Holocaust take centre stage. 1945: the end game is being played out. Ian Bute and Tolkien travel East with Churchill, and as they do so the secrets of ancient, millennial, old Europe emerge from the rubble. On their journey they encounter seventy archetypal men from through the ages, and rub shoulders with all the major world figures of literature, music and politics. A parallel narrative gives an added Tolkienesque dimension to this odyssey from West to East, culminating in a dramatic showdown in a clash of empires. 

Pascal BacquéThe event at Librairie La Page has been arranged in collaboration with the Hexagon Society, a centre for French and English cross-cultural exchange that facilitates encounters between thinkers and artists and the general public.

@EditionsMassot @BHL @LIBRAIRIELAPAGE

Pascal Bacqué is a poet, a writer, and artistic collaborator and a devotee of the Talmud. He has worked as director of the collection « Libelles » for L’âge d’Homme, as a member of the editorial board of the magazine La Règle du Jeu, and as director of the French Talmudic College with René Lévy. His works include Imperium (L’âge d’Homme, 2007), The Legend of Elijah (L’âge d’Homme, 2011), Ode to Armageddon (L’âge d’Homme, 2014).

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Interview | Megan Dunn | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Invercargill, a small city at the bottom of the South Island in New Zealand. But my formative years (if they ever ended) were spent in Rotorua, a tourist town in the centre of the North Island. Rotorua – “Rotovegas” to the locals – is stepped in Maori history and is a geothermal wonderland known for strong wafts of sulphur, hokey motels and hotels, putt-putt golf. The McDonalds in Rotorua has Maori carvings on the walls.

What sorts of books were in your family home? Who were early formative influences?
I grew up in a flat above an old peoples home with my single parent Mum, who was a night nurse for the elderly residents downstairs. The sign at the top of our drive read: “Residence for the Elderly,” I walked past it to school every day. Books: loads. From Men and their Mothers, and other pop psychology, to Sweet Valley High. At fourteen, I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer on the back porch, while the elderly residents ate shortbread and drank tea in the lounge below me. They read Mills and Boons in large print, when they weren’t listening to the TV. Continue reading Interview | Megan Dunn | Author of the Week

Interview | Heidi James | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Chatham in Kent and grew up in the surrounding towns – called the Medway towns – so in and around Rochester, Chatham (on various estates), Gillingham. I left when I was seventeen and moved to London, but even though I’ve not lived there for a long time, Medway remains a potent influence.

What sorts of books were in your family home? Who were early formative influences?
My mother and grandmother were avid readers, and I was taught to read and love books from a very early age; but they were busy, working class women who’d left school early so the books in our homes tended to be Catherine Cookson and romances, Mills and Boon etc. Having said that I had lots of classic children’s books and I had a couple of teachers who were pretty amazing in encouraging me to read widely. When I was teenager I skipped school to go the library in town and would read anything and everything curled up in a chair by a window that looked out over the River Medway. I read a lot of Dickens, Daphne du Maurier and Stephen King. I used to read any of the Penguin Classics, because that seemed to be a foolproof method of reading; I was hungry to learn, but hated school. I suppose my earliest influences that I was consciously reading to learn to write were Angela Carter, Plath and Sexton and John Steinbeck. I loved his work. Continue reading Interview | Heidi James | Author of the Week

Interview | Henrietta Rose-Innes | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
Born and bred in Cape Town, under Table Mountain. All of Africa to the north, Antarctica to the south, and an ocean on either hand.

What sorts of books were in your family home? Who were early formative influences?
It was a bookish home – we were always retreating into fantasy in different corners of the house. My parents had various interests and they collected books on art, archaeology, rare plants, antiques, medicine, carpentry, bird-keeping . . . as well as poetry and certain kind of mid-century fiction that they discovered in their youth. I grew up reading Graham Greene and Hemingway and Carson McCullers and a lot of classic Science Fiction. It was an old-fashioned but solid education. Continue reading Interview | Henrietta Rose-Innes | Author of the Week

Interview | Sam Mills, Dodo Ink | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m unusual in that I’m from a working class family – not many of us working in publishing, or getting published, for that matter. My parents weren’t great readers. My mum did notice and nurture my love of reading, however, by returning from jumble sales with bags of dog-eared books – Enid Blyton, Anne Fine, Roald Dahl. She was a wonderful mum.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
I think ‘work’ is the wrong word. None of us are earning any money from Dodo. I’m a writer (I somehow earn my living from writing) who moonlights as a publisher. I guess it’s an unusual reversal: writing is my day ‘job’, though I love it so much I don’t regard it as a job. We’re running Dodo out of passion for the books which publish. Continue reading Interview | Sam Mills, Dodo Ink | Indie Publisher of the Week