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Tag: Africa

The past and the present side by side: a conversation with Peter Kimani

Kenyan writer Peter Kimani talks to us about how he tackled the past in his latest novel, representing otherness, and freedom of speech in Kenya.

Dance of the Jakaranda is a complex book of interwoven stories that spans generations. How did it come into being?

In 2007 I went to a writing programme in Iowa. Writers from different parts of the world spend a semester writing, giving readings and community engagement activities. I lived in an Iowan hotel for three months, and that was the genesis of the idea, of a hotel being the setting for a story.

I returned to Kenya at the end of that year just as there was another disputed election. There was violence, people were killed. That challenged our presumptions as Kenyans: Who are we collectively? Who are we individually? And why are we still wrestling with those simple questions? This gave impetus to the direction of my story. I had sought to write something simple, but it inadvertently evolved into something complex.

I found that writing about Indians living in Kenya was a useful group to write about when exploring the Kenyan identity. They were imported into the country by the British as part of the indentured labour, and have now inhabited that place for over five generations.

The structure of the story was also something that evolved gradually. The book imitates the railroad: with two parallel stories, the past of the 1890s and the present of the 1960s, side by side. I was examining those two perspectives – not just black and white, but the brown in between.

I also incorporated African oral storytelling tropes into the book. These tend to dance around a topic, with repetition and cyclical motions to the narrative, all deliberately so. You even have specific echoes of African storytelling, like when somebody says hadithi hadithi and there is a call and response hadithin jo, and I occasionally tease out such a device.

And both timelines have unreliable narrators…

The character of Nyundo the drummer powerfully reclaimed a place for himself in the story. Traditional communities used to communicate through drums, and he is the folk historian who witnesses history as it happens. Meanwhile, the colonial administrator who records the same events has another version of the history. So through Nyundo, I contest the validity of history as we know it, because what is recorded officially is never told from the perspective of the victim, it is always from the perspective of the victor. In other words I am teasing out the absurdity of a continent whose story has been told through the outside view and hardly their own. In the earlier drafts, Nyundo was dead for many years, but then he insisted on living in the text! To me, this symbolises the resurrection of African memory. He shifts the reader’s perspective because he is saying, ‘I saw it happen, I am the witness who experienced it, this is my story I am telling’ … and so challenging presumptions about Africa’s own story.

The main characters in this story are Indian, not from an indigenous East African group. How did you approach writing them, and ensure that you did justice to the characters and not slip into ’cultural appropriation’?

Actually I am currently teaching a course called ‘representing otherness’, examining how Africa’s colonial past has been exploited by white writers, and how black writers in the same space are writing about white characters. With regards to the Indians in Dance of the Jakaranda, people ask, ‘Why are you writing about what is not your story?’ My simple response is that Indians are part of the collective of what makes Kenya. So they are as Kenyan as I am and their story is my story to that extent.

When trying to give voice to another person, one is challenged to do it with integrity and faithfulness. My fidelity to my characters is to have no set notions of what their story is, because I am writing partly to discover. In my current book, I am exploring the life of a deaf and a mute person, and that will be a revelation. If it helps examine that community and the challenges they navigate through, I would have empowered somebody who doesn’t have the skills to state it as I do. So I will state that story and let others respond to it.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o now writes in his mother tongue of Giyuku. What do you think of that and would you consider writing novels in your own mother tongue?

I started my writing in Swahili as a journalist for Taifa Leo (the sister publication to English-language Daily Nation). I did that for a year and a half and I’m very proud of my contributions to that publication. So I do sympathise with Ngũgĩ’s cause and the concern that we should not keep all this knowledge in ‘foreign granaries’, where it can only be accessed by those who speak those languages. What does it mean for those populations that cannot access the material in those languages, coded in a foreign tongue?

I partly addressed this in Dance of the Jakaranda. I deliberately deployed literary ‘indigenisation’. The book signals that it is being told in a colonial language. English is delivering the story, but the characters were originally speaking something different.

Kenya needs to invest in an infrastructure that can promote development of its own languages. Tanzania adopted Swahili as its official language in 1961 and there is now a thriving publishing scene there that we do not have in Kenya. The government should be doing more. Look at Hebrew – it is spoken by around 5 million people, about the same as the number of Gikuyu speakers. But look at the number of texts that are in Hebrew, because of the investment in the language.

How difficult is it to make these criticisms of Kenya? As a former journalist, what is your view on the state of freedom of expression?

I should say expressly that I think the current state of affairs in Kenya as far as press freedom is concerned is probably one of the worst in 25 years.

They propose to be a ‘digital’ government – meaning young and modern and sophisticated. But they are more repressive than the stone age politicians like Moi, who did not deal with the internet. The absurdity of this is that when one tries to muzzle voices in the age of the internet, then your mentality must be from the stone age, because you cannot stop me and other writers from expressing ourselves! They have displayed a twentieth century mentality of information.

What we are seeing now in Kenya is the systematic shutdown of different voices, journalists being sacked at the Daily Nation and the Standard. Daniel Arap Moi, by virtue of his longevity, was more relaxed towards the final years of his rule, especially when he witnessed the inevitable shift of global politics, which has implications on the conduct of politics in Kenya. But the younger people have more energies and are very thin skinned, more so than the older generation, which is an irony.

Literature to me seems to be the only free thing left in the world. Journalism has been complicated by the shift in technology, both the way we consume and disperse information, and the growing anxieties funding for a lot of media ventures. Literature to me seems to be the only free thing left.

Peter Kimani is an award-winning Kenyan novelist and journalist. In 2011 he received the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for literature, Kenya’s highest literary honour, for his children’s book Upside Down. Kimani was one of three international poets to compose and present a poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. A prominent journalist on Kenya’s national news circuit, Kimani’s work has also appeared in the Guardian, New African and Sky News. His latest novel, Dance of the Jakaranda, was published by Telegram.

Interview by Robert Sharp.

June 19, 2018
From Afrikaans to English: on writing and translating 'The Alphabet of Birds'

One tends to dive into translating one’s own debut work in the same way as one dived into writing it in the first place: headlong. My background is in law, and specifically the cold, adversarial kind of legal practice that entails negotiating large business transactions. I’m not trained as a translator, literary or otherwise. And, other than in tangential ways, my background as a lawyer did not do much to further the kind of skills, or at least allow for the quiet reflection, required for writing fiction.

So, when asked about the process of writing or translating my collection of stories, published in English as The Alphabet of Birds (Alfabet van die voëls in Afrikaans), it forced me go back and disentangle something that I did intuitively rather than through careful reflection. This is actually not unusual, I’m sure (even when one’s background is in literature or language), particularly for a debut work that was written when one’s innocence as a writer was still more or less intact. You find out much about the work you wrote, and the decisions you made in translating it, after the event.

While living outside South Africa for most of my adult life, I hardly ever spoke Afrikaans. English was the language in which I worked and socialised. Afrikaans was regained quite suddenly once I started writing. It simply emerged ‘intact’ after having been, as it were, ‘preserved’ for many years. The notion of ‘intactness’ is, of course, a fallacy. Languages are not static. Afrikaans, more than most languages, underwent significant changes in the period of my absence from South Africa (1994-2010). Its social position has changed and it has lost a huge amount of ground as a language of higher functions. Concomitantly, spoken Afrikaans has developed (degenerated?) in many ways. As a result, the Afrikaans that I felt re-emerging against my palate and in the glottis was a little formal and archaic, somewhat removed from the new Afrikaans (or mix of Afrikaans and English) spoken particularly by a younger generation of urban South Africans. Broken English has become the lingua franca of the new South Africa, and (bad) English is exerting a huge influence on (particularly spoken) Afrikaans. As I was no longer really in touch with spoken Afrikaans, I therefore often wrote dialogue in English and then translated it back into Afrikaans after doing some careful listening around. All of it then ultimately goes back into English. Even when I’m writing now, some of the prose starts out in English before being translated into Afrikaans. There is movement towards synchronicity – i.e. the Afrikaans and English texts being written almost simultaneously.

South African author Ivan Vladislavić recently asked me about the preparation of different English versions of my collection for South Africa, on the one hand, and for the UK/US on the other. This did not entail too many difficult choices. The approach was to keep as much as possible local colour by sticking to South African usage, except where it would be confusing to a British or American reader. For instance, for both the SA and UK/US English editions, German phrases (that are more easily comprehensible for Afrikaans readers due to the recent Germanic roots of Afrikaans) were translated into English. A word like ‘bakkie’ in the South African English was changed to ‘pickup truck’ for UK and US readers. Sometimes choices had to be made between UK and US usage, resulting, for instance, in the use of ‘lift’ instead of ‘elevator’.

An interesting dimension of translating these stories was the interaction between the themes of the stories and the act of translation. The stories may perhaps be considered to fall under the rubric of ‘diasporic literature’. And if emigration entails continuous processes of psychological translation of the self to unfamiliar cultural contexts, and of those contexts to oneself, then the experiences central to diasporic work must surely be re-enacted in language when the author translates his own work from or into his mother tongue.

Translating your own work gives you a marvellous freedom. You may rewrite, add or subtract to your heart’s desire. When translating someone else’s work, the need for engagement with, and obtaining the approval of, the author (provided he knows the target language) changes the nature of the process in an important way. I doubt whether, to me, translation would provide as much pleasure, such a sense of intuitive abandon, if I were to be subjected to the constraint of having to deal with an author’s wishes. On the other hand, I have heard accounts from translators of exhilarating interaction with writers, particularly in cases where a work of exceptional quality is being translated, the translator is innovative and the author is open to creative collaboration.

I’ve not had the experience of my work being translated by someone else into a language I know. If any of my future work were to be translated into English, I’d probably prefer to do it myself again, given the opportunity it affords me to ensure that different voices, registers and nuances are dealt with in exactly the way I believe they should be. My stories will shortly be translated into Dutch, of which I have a good passive knowledge, but with which I’m not sufficiently familiar in order to help calibrate or tweak the translation. I doubt whether I will insist on providing much input. (It certainly helps that I have an excellent veteran translator for the Dutch, someone whose sensibilities and judgement I trust implicitly.)

In short, it might be best to translate your own work if you are able to. If it is into a language that one doesn’t speak well enough to confidently double-guess the translator, it would seem logical to be hands-off. And, mercifully, in the case of translation into a language that one doesn’t speak at all, there is, of course, no opportunity for proper involvement by the author. There is surely freedom too in just letting go.

You can read more about SJ Naude at his author profile at the And Other Stories website.

Ivan Vladislavic has written about SJ Naudé for Ampersand.

You can buy The Alphabet of Birds via our bookseller partner Foyles.

January 22, 2015
From Afrikaans to English: on writing and translating ‘The Alphabet of Birds’

One tends to dive into translating one’s own debut work in the same way as one dived into writing it in the first place: headlong. My background is in law, and specifically the cold, adversarial kind of legal practice that entails negotiating large business transactions. I’m not trained as a translator, literary or otherwise. And, other than in tangential ways, my background as a lawyer did not do much to further the kind of skills, or at least allow for the quiet reflection, required for writing fiction.

So, when asked about the process of writing or translating my collection of stories, published in English as The Alphabet of Birds (Alfabet van die voëls in Afrikaans), it forced me go back and disentangle something that I did intuitively rather than through careful reflection. This is actually not unusual, I’m sure (even when one’s background is in literature or language), particularly for a debut work that was written when one’s innocence as a writer was still more or less intact. You find out much about the work you wrote, and the decisions you made in translating it, after the event.

While living outside South Africa for most of my adult life, I hardly ever spoke Afrikaans. English was the language in which I worked and socialised. Afrikaans was regained quite suddenly once I started writing. It simply emerged ‘intact’ after having been, as it were, ‘preserved’ for many years. The notion of ‘intactness’ is, of course, a fallacy. Languages are not static. Afrikaans, more than most languages, underwent significant changes in the period of my absence from South Africa (1994-2010). Its social position has changed and it has lost a huge amount of ground as a language of higher functions. Concomitantly, spoken Afrikaans has developed (degenerated?) in many ways. As a result, the Afrikaans that I felt re-emerging against my palate and in the glottis was a little formal and archaic, somewhat removed from the new Afrikaans (or mix of Afrikaans and English) spoken particularly by a younger generation of urban South Africans. Broken English has become the lingua franca of the new South Africa, and (bad) English is exerting a huge influence on (particularly spoken) Afrikaans. As I was no longer really in touch with spoken Afrikaans, I therefore often wrote dialogue in English and then translated it back into Afrikaans after doing some careful listening around. All of it then ultimately goes back into English. Even when I’m writing now, some of the prose starts out in English before being translated into Afrikaans. There is movement towards synchronicity – i.e. the Afrikaans and English texts being written almost simultaneously.

South African author Ivan Vladislavić recently asked me about the preparation of different English versions of my collection for South Africa, on the one hand, and for the UK/US on the other. This did not entail too many difficult choices. The approach was to keep as much as possible local colour by sticking to South African usage, except where it would be confusing to a British or American reader. For instance, for both the SA and UK/US English editions, German phrases (that are more easily comprehensible for Afrikaans readers due to the recent Germanic roots of Afrikaans) were translated into English. A word like ‘bakkie’ in the South African English was changed to ‘pickup truck’ for UK and US readers. Sometimes choices had to be made between UK and US usage, resulting, for instance, in the use of ‘lift’ instead of ‘elevator’.

An interesting dimension of translating these stories was the interaction between the themes of the stories and the act of translation. The stories may perhaps be considered to fall under the rubric of ‘diasporic literature’. And if emigration entails continuous processes of psychological translation of the self to unfamiliar cultural contexts, and of those contexts to oneself, then the experiences central to diasporic work must surely be re-enacted in language when the author translates his own work from or into his mother tongue.

Translating your own work gives you a marvellous freedom. You may rewrite, add or subtract to your heart’s desire. When translating someone else’s work, the need for engagement with, and obtaining the approval of, the author (provided he knows the target language) changes the nature of the process in an important way. I doubt whether, to me, translation would provide as much pleasure, such a sense of intuitive abandon, if I were to be subjected to the constraint of having to deal with an author’s wishes. On the other hand, I have heard accounts from translators of exhilarating interaction with writers, particularly in cases where a work of exceptional quality is being translated, the translator is innovative and the author is open to creative collaboration.

I’ve not had the experience of my work being translated by someone else into a language I know. If any of my future work were to be translated into English, I’d probably prefer to do it myself again, given the opportunity it affords me to ensure that different voices, registers and nuances are dealt with in exactly the way I believe they should be. My stories will shortly be translated into Dutch, of which I have a good passive knowledge, but with which I’m not sufficiently familiar in order to help calibrate or tweak the translation. I doubt whether I will insist on providing much input. (It certainly helps that I have an excellent veteran translator for the Dutch, someone whose sensibilities and judgement I trust implicitly.)

In short, it might be best to translate your own work if you are able to. If it is into a language that one doesn’t speak well enough to confidently double-guess the translator, it would seem logical to be hands-off. And, mercifully, in the case of translation into a language that one doesn’t speak at all, there is, of course, no opportunity for proper involvement by the author. There is surely freedom too in just letting go.

You can read more about SJ Naude at his author profile at the And Other Stories website.

Ivan Vladislavic has written about SJ Naudé for Ampersand.

You can buy The Alphabet of Birds via our bookseller partner Foyles.

January 22, 2015
Rain and Bamboo

In the wetter parts of Africa, bamboo provides for many household needs. African bamboo, it must be said, is a giant bamboo, just as Africa is a giant continent. African bamboo can grow to eighty feet tall, a huge swaying stalk and a gluttonous lover of soil. Gallant too, for it likes to bow, to kiss the ground and sleep at the feet of its surroundings, though it usually rises up majestically, pointing triumphantly to the zephyr, the sky of the thousand night stars that shine madly in certain parts of Africa. Anyone who has had the good fortune to set foot on African soil, in its wettest and windiest parts, will have noticed that bamboo is a prime building material, and they will have doubtless seen two or three boys amusing themselves with bamboo toys. Bamboo can be used to make a thousand household utensils, and weapons too, useful when confronting the natives, whether from flora or fauna, for both can be overly exuberant in certain parts.

Anyone who’s been to Africa but not woken up with a stiff neck after sleeping on a hard bamboo bed, hasn’t really been to Africa, or at least hasn’t experienced the true beauty of Africa, never mind talk of thousand-year-old landscapes and supposedly flowering economies. Dried bamboo leaves provide the fluffy insides of mattresses, serving our daily appointment with the God of Rest, while bamboo forests provide myriad possibilities to men and women in love, for when the sun sets across Africa, the continent becomes a great scene of secret courting. To speak of bamboo is, therefore, to speak of life in Africa, a life that is flourishing, fluid and sometimes secret, a life that is hidden behind a thousand cloths of a thousand different colours, conveyed by a thousand songs and a thousand different ways of giving names to reality.

For there are languages in Africa, indigenous forms of talking, and some languages have been around for thousands of years, though when we say thousands of years we may not mean real years, for there’s always room for imagination in Africa. These languages, these means of describing reality, are sometimes so peculiar that they defy the miracles of science, and some even took it upon themselves to cross borders, artificial borders erected long after everything else, to later appear in books left behind as testimony. But despite their being peculiar and nomadic, the few thousand people left in my grandmother’s village, now that the grandchildren have set out on hundreds of different paths towards particular norths, haven’t stopped speaking these languages, just as they haven’t stopped using bamboo, and the rain hasn’t stopped falling, pitter-patter, in the nearby forest.

To speak of books left behind as testimony is to speak of knowledge, understanding, imagination. Ultimately it is to speak of how hundreds of butterflies come down from the bamboo plants and settle on village floors wet with rain, in those parts of Africa where rain comes more than a few days a year. Ultimately it is to speak of how those butterflies imprint their sensations onto leaves, so that future generations of butterflies might learn to travel without risking anything other than their own fear. Art, literature, creation on paper. The sublime art of evoking experiences, of bequeathing knowledge to future generations, of passing on survival instructions to women and men, girls and boys, in villages of forests and rain.

That’s to say, in order for there to be a language, somebody must speak it, use it, make sense of the world with it. For every book there are a thousand other tales of rain and bamboo that are never written down due to more pressing needs. Artistic books, that’s to say literature, tell of unknown, faraway places, lands and languages fighting for survival, impervious to the fact that stories are sold in books these days, and mostly in English, or two or three other powerful languages. Lands where bamboo is still used, despite the fact that it has been replaced elsewhere by elastic or some conglomeration of metals ripped from African soil.

Books bring glimpses of lives that people don’t see, lives lived in languages of little weight and reach. So when the learned sit down to discuss the real, or supposed, quality of books produced by people from bamboo places, they should bear two things in mind: that these works offer traces of lives lived under different circumstances, lives where the book as product means nothing; that stories will go on being told, just as they’ve always been told, but in fewer voices, destiny having allowed mortal silence to ravish entire bamboo communities. So if we want to speak of the art of writing, it is a terrible injustice to have certain works undermined just because their author didn’t know, despite himself, the language of those who decide things in the modern world. To do so is to do more than kill the artist of the unknown language, it is to kill art itself.

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. His parents were from the remote Annobón Island, off the African coast. His books include the novel Avión de Ricos, Ladrón De Cerdos (The Pig Thief And The Rich Man’s Aeroplane) and the short story collection Cuentos Crudos (Raw Tales).

Ávila Laurel has been a constant thorn in the side of his country’s long-standing dictatorial government. A nurse by profession, for many years he was one of the best known Equatorial Guinean writers not to have opted to live in exile. But, in 2011, after a week-long hunger strike in protest against Obiang’s regime, timed to coincide with the President of Spain’s visit to Equatorial Guinea, Ávila Laurel moved to Barcelona. He writes across all media, in particular as a blogger, essayist and novelist. By Night the Mountain Burns was published in November by And Other Stories.

By Night the Mountain Burns was published in November by And Other Stories, and is available to buy from our bookseller partner Foyles.

You can read more about Jethro Soutar’s experience of translating Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel.

More information about Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel can be found at his author profile at the Foyles website.

December 18, 2014
Yule love these books in translation 2014

Roasting chestnuts on an open fire, taking the first whiff of mulled wine, and cracking open a great work of literature in translation: find your stocking-filler or winter-cheerer with these recommendations from top writers

Jo Baker, writer

Suspended Sentences, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti (Yale University Press)

Together, these three novellas form a beautiful evocation of life in and around Paris towards the latter part of the 20th Century. They each centre on a noirish mystery – the search for a shadowy figure, or for something just out of reach – but these are stories that resist resolution. Ultimately, they’re more concerned with absences, with gaps, with what can’t quite be remembered or grasped, than with what has ‘actually happened’… and so they feel like lace, full of elegantly captured spaces. As the narrator of ‘Afterimage’ says: ‘Of all the punctuation marks… ellipses were his favourite’. He’s talking about the photographer Jensen, but that could equally be suggested of Modiano himself.

Alexandra Büchler, director of Literature Across Frontiers

Nowhere People by Paulo Scott (And Other Stories) stands way out among the books I read in 2014. It’s the kind of novel you read and already look forward to reading it again although it makes such a painful read. Translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, it is an innovative and emphatic j’accuse by a former lawyer and activist, a great example of the possibility of political engagement through literature, a reminder of one of the worst crimes in the history of mankind, the crime of displacing and annihilating indigenous people around the globe. Read this if you don’t mind crying. Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao – New York – Bilbao (Seren Books) translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin is a mix of travel writing, family history and reflections on Basque culture and its place in today’s world. It is a book about journeys, the many journeys made by Uribe’s father and grandfather on Basque fishing boats and his own travels as a writer who has inherited their language. Read this if you want to be moved by the simple prose of an author who is primarily a poet. Lasha Bugadze was one of the Georgian writers on board of Literature Express, a train carrying some 100 authors across Europe to celebrate the new millenium. His novel of the same title translated from the Georgian by Maya Kiasashvili (Dalkey Archive Press), is a fictionalized account of that journey. Brilliant, funny, tragicomic, it pokes fun at the construct of Europe with its inherent hierarchies and inequalities played out in the environment of a literary festival on wheels. Read this if you want to laugh.

Robert Chandler, translator from Russian

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Oliver Ready (Penguin Classics). At last we have a translation that brings out the wild humour and vitality of the original. A.N. Wilson, who also chose this as a ‘Book of the Year’, is right to call it a ‘truly great translation’. Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (Liveright, 2014). A book about Dante rather than a translation – but Prue Shaw succeeds brilliantly in making a foreign writer accessible to a wider readership, which is, of course, just what a translator does. I have been reading and re-reading Dante all my adult life and have never read anything better, clearer or more inspiring about him.

Jonathan Coe, writer

The book I most enjoyed in English translation this year was Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère translated by John Lambert (Allen Lane). It’s rare to find a book so original in form (is it a novel? is it a biography?) and at the same time so compelling in content. A fascinating portrait, not just of a memorably grotesque, larger-than-life character, but of Russia itself.

Geraldine D’Amico, Folkestone Book Festival and King’s Place Spoken Word Programmer and translator

My favourite book this year was certainly Frederic Gros’ A Philosophy of Walking translated by John Howe (Verso Books). This is a book about the simplest, most basic thing human beings have been doing for ever, whether to go from point A to point B, to experience nature or as a form of exercise. Frederic Gros is both a keen walker and a philosopher. In his book he alternates chapters about his experience as someone who simply enjoys walking, preferably slowly, and chapters about famous thinkers and why walking was important for them: from Kant who had such a routine that you could set your watch by the time he appeared at a certain place, to Rimbaud, the wandering poet, Thoreau and his cabin in the woods and many more. It is a delightful book to be read from beginning to end or dipped in now and then, perfect to pack in a rucksack and pull out with one’s picnic, food for the mind and the soul.

Boris Dralyuk, translator from Russian

I’ve been lucky enough to review a number of books in translation in 2014 and I would eagerly recommend Bill Johnston’s inspired recreation of the contemporary Polish poet Tomasz Różycki’s mock-epic Twelve Stations (Zephyr, 2014), Bryan Karetnyk’s sensitive re-translation of the Russian émigré novelists Gaito Gazdanov’s ‘metaphysical thriller’ The Buddha’s Return (Pushkin Press, 2014), and John Lambert’s seamless rendition of Emmanuelle Carrere’s rollicking biographical novel Limonov (Allen Lane, 2014). But I’d be a fool to squander an opportunity to praise two more publications that are not to be missed. Anne Marie Jackson, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Clare Kitson, Irina Sternberg and Natalie Wase have done an extraordinary service to the Russian author Teffi (1872-1952) — and to the Anglophone reader — by selecting and translating Subtly Worded (Pushkin, 2014), a volume of stories that could not be more aptly titled. Teffi was not only a great wit and an impeccable stylist, but one of the twentieth century’s most perceptive and clear-headed observers. Subtly Worded is flawless — a true revelation. This year Antonia Lloyd-Jones, one of the premiere translators of Polish prose, has brought us Mariusz Szczygieł’s remarkably engaging Gottland (Melville House, 2014), an idiosyncratic chronicle of the Czechs’ Kafkaesque journey through the twentieth century. Szczygieł’s book exposes the dangers of compromise, the importance of memory, and the differences between the national experiences of two Slavic peoples – a particularly relevant subject, in a year when the Slavic world is again in crisis.

Maya Jaggi, a cultural journalist and literary critic, a judge of this year’s International Impac Dublin Literary Award

Tomás González is among the brilliant Colombian writers emerging from the shadow of Gabriel García Márquez. In the Beginning Was the Sea (Pushkin Press), translated by Frank Wynne, is about a 30-something couple from Medellín who buy a run-down estate on the Caribbean coast to live the good life, but whose rustic dream sours as they fatally antagonise the locals. It’s a forensic portrait of a doomed relationship and environmental hubris, with the irony of a plantation novel – and a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of escaping to the country. Joan Sales’s Uncertain Glory (MacLehose Press), a Catalan-language classic from the 1950s revived in Peter Bush’s translation minus the cuts of Franco’s censors, follows three men in love with the same woman in civil-war Spain. Sales fought for the Republicans in the Aragon trenches, and lays bare the absurdities of war with astringent satire through the disillusioned eyes of the defeated. I would also recommend Kirmen Uribe’s novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (Seren Books), translated by Elizabeth Macklin. A reflective insight into three generations of Basque family history, it is crafted with the structure of a trawler’s net by one of Spain’s most exciting young novelists – who writes in Basque – and is the perfect read for anyone on a plane.

Roland Gulliver, Associate Director, Edinburgh International Book Festival

He has been hitting all the literary headlines this year but Karl Ove Knausgaard is definitely worth the hype. Reading the first three books in his series, Death in the Family, Man in Love and Boyhood Island translated by Don Bartlett (Harvill Secker), has been an incredible experience. Intense, insightful, funny, addictive; like all great books they make you see yourself and your world afresh, challenging your perspectives on art, literature and society. My great discovery this year was George Simenon (translated by David Bellos, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale and many more). Penguin have taken on the admirably impressive task of retranslating all of his novels over a 7 year period. I have to confess I had stereotyped Maigret as pedestrian Sunday night TV but the novels are fascinating. These short novels capture society in post-war France, highlighting the class divide and the rise of the petit-bourgeoisie, the growth of cities and the fear of immigration, and desperate measures people go to out of fear, greed or just trying to survive. Finally, my funniest book of the year is Weapons of Mass Diplomacy written by Abel Lanzac, drawn by Christophe Blain and translated by Edward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero). Set in the French Foreign Office at the time of the Iraq crisis, it is that rare beast of laugh out loud funny. A graphic novel version of The Thick of It with a unique Gallic twist!

Daniel Hahn, translator from Spanish and Portugese

My choice would be The Adventures of Shola, by Bernardo Atxaga, and translated by Margaret Jull Costa – a charming, witty, spirited collection of stories about the exploits of an irresistibly characterful little dog. It’s a children’s book – Atxaga’s first in English – and a great Christmas present for children, but I think I may have to buy a few copies for adults, too…

Amanda Hopkinson, translator from Spanish, Portugese and French

One is – or rather are – two children’s books by Erich Kästner, translated from the German by the impeccable Anthea Bell. Just like Emil and the Detectives, Kästner’s best-known tale, The Flying Classroom and The Parent Trap are pitched at 9+-year-olds, and I enjoyed every word of both, before reluctantly passing them onto my grandson. They explore childhood with wit and invention while spinning magical yarns interwoven with the erratic and bizarre actions of adults and the independent-mindedness of children. Small wonder the Nazis saw fit to burn them! My other choice does not have a translator but is, in a sense, still a translation. Only recently has Turkish novelist Elif Shafak started composing her books in English, and The Architect’s Apprentice is clearly an original, unfiltered through any word-for-word mental process. It spans an elephantine journey from Hindustan through the Ottoman Empire, relaying the adventures of a baby – then growing – elephant and his mahout. Stuffed with histories of new worlds and human ways, this is magical realism as it encounters Orientalism in a literary explosion akin to a New Year’s firework display.

Michele Hutchinson, translator from Dutch and editor

There are some fantastic Dutch children’s classics and Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt is one of them. Laura Watkinson’s skilful translation was published this year by Pushkin Press and garnered excellent reviews. The strapline reads, ‘A young messenger. A secret mission. A kingdom in peril’. A perfect gift for a young nephew or niece. That same nephew or niece might also enjoy The Cat Who Came in off the Roof by Annie M.G. Schmidt, one of the best-loved Dutch children’s writers of all time. Beautifully packaged by (again) Pushkin Press in a retro-looking edition and charmingly translated by David Colmer.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones, translator from Polish

One of my favourite books to be published this year is Harlequin’s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal (Archipelago). Any Hrabal fans will recognise the nameless narrator as the beautiful heroine of his earlier work, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. Now she and her husband Francin, manager of the brewery, and his charismatic brother Uncle Pepin, are finishing their days in a most unusual retirement home – a decaying castle that once belonged to a legendary count, where classical figures continue to pose and battle in crumbling paintings and sculptures. As the narrator reminisces and her fellow pensioners tell their stories of the past, we sense that rather than standing still, time is running in parallel, and the people in their colourful tales are still very much alive, while also being long since dead and gone. Meanwhile, the lovely ballet music of ‘Harlequin’s Millions’ drifts throughout the castle as a constant accompaniment to Hrabal’s lilting prose, which has lost none of its lyricism in Stacey Knecht’s magnificent translation.

Catherine Taylor, literary critic, Deputy Director of the English PEN

Elena Ferrante has been the year’s most-talked about sensation in literature – quite possibly for the wrong reasons. The extreme reclusiveness of the author has led to debates which go far beyond any assessment of her actual work. And what subversive, sensuous work it is. In Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay, (Europa Editions) translated with aplomb by Ann Goldstein, the third volume in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series of novels about childhood friends Lila and Elena, she explores the intense rivalries of female friendship and nascent feminism against the backdrop of Italy in the 1960s.

His first book, Traveller of the Century, was a bulky, quintessential novel of ideas. Talking to Ourselves, Andrés Neuman’s new book (Pushkin Press), is short, intense and unforgettable as a small family comes to terms with the terminal illness of one of its beloved members. Excoriating , painfully soul-searching and impeccably translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García. Lastly, Isaac Babel, the great Russian writer who died in 1940 at the height of Stalin’s purges, is well-served by a new translation of his best-known collection, Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press). Boris Dralyuk brings to vivid life Babel’s wry, unflinching account of his time as a correspondent in the Red Army during Russia’s civil war.

Adam Thirlwell – writer

The translated book I loved most this year was Michel Laub’s Diary of the Fall (Harvill Secker) translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Its themes seem pure grandeur – memory, the Holocaust, writing, nostalgia – but its construction is so original and elegant that the grandeur seeps into you, unawares. What I mean is: it might not seem the perfect Christmas present, but on the principle that you should give the best books to the people you love, then everyone you love should get Michel Laub’s new novel.

Ros Schwartz, translator from French

My choice is The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Andrew Bromfield (Peirene Press). Exquisitely written and translated, searing, magical, inventive and poignant – one of those books that stays with you for a long time.

Naomi Wood, writer

I’m afraid I’m only just crawling out from my Hemingway-sized reading hole, but the book I really enjoyed reading in translation was Elena Ferrente’s My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale, trans. Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions). She describes the intense, passionate and decidedly overwhelming friendship of two young girls in postwar Naples in such vivid prose; I adored this book, and can’t wait to read the next ones in the series.

A.M. Bakalar, author

Voices from Tibet: Selected Essays and Reportage by Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, edited and translated by Violet S. Law (Hong Kong University Press). A short but powerful book on China’s rule over Tibet. These essays explore a wide range of topics, from the ongoing destruction of Tibetan culture, environment and freedom to self-immolation as a form of protest against the Chinese heavy-handed control.

Wioletta Greg (or Wioletta Grzegorzewska in Polish) is a mesmerising voice of young Polish émigré authors. Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance by Wioletta Greg translated by Marek Kazmierski (Arc Publications) is a delightful collection of selected poems and prose, here published in Polish with English translation.

Books that make you laugh are notoriously difficult to write. Two novels, published this year, in particular brought me to tears. Mission London by a Bulgarian author Alek Popov translated by Charles de M Gill (Istros Book) and Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes translated from German by Jamie Bullock (MacLehose Press). The former describes the experiences of a newly appointed Bulgarian ambassador to London, the latter brings Adolf Hitler from the dead into contemporary Germany. I can’t remember when I laughed so much during reading in years.

December 11, 2014
To speak or not to speak, that is the question

Translated by Frank Wynne

The laws in Algeria, ever since the country gained Independence in 1962, are all – how can I put it? – a stirring hymn to freedom of expression.

So much for the written word. The reality is very different.

Ben Bella, known as B.B. the Bomb, the first president of Algeria, gifted the country with a magnificent constitution, but at a personal level he could not bear criticism nor even the notion that others might think differently from him. He set up a secret militia, rather like Papa Doc Duvalier’s ‘Tonton Macoute’, whom the general public referred to as the Bouchkaras [1] because they operated by night wearing black balaclavas and in short order, they cleansed the country of his critics. They were never seen again. Under Ben Bella’s rule, to speak was the principal reason for disappearances.

In 1965, Colonel Boumediene, head of the military, known as Boum the Terror, seized power and held on to it until his death in 1978. The man was a cold-blooded dictator, he tortured and killed with no qualms, the way a surgeon might operate in a clinic. He founded the S.M. – the Sécurité Militaire [2] – a sort of sprawling, all-powerful KGB, which the general public referred to as Sports & Music.

He was succeeded by another colonel, Chadli Bendjedid, popularly known as Jeff Chandler, since he looked just like the actor. He was an easy-going fellow and allowed himself to be persuaded that some limited freedom had to be offered to the populace to lift the country out of the abject misery caused about by the dictatorship. But by now the people were too accustomed to silence to suddenly begin speaking, they feared the return of the authoritarianism. The Islamists, however, took full advantage and the mosques became hives of activity where everything was discussed, especially jihad against the infidels. The decent, upstanding president took fright and switched off the microphones. The apparatchiks of the F.L.N., the only political party, popularly know as the Barbéfélènes [3] because they wore beards in order to exploit the Islamists, and suits to dupe the laity, sprang into action. They were very efficient; in the blink of an eye, the prisons were full to bursting.

There followed a civil war (1990-2000), during which there were two presidents, Boudiaf [4] and Zeroual. The former was assassinated six months after being enthroned, the other was ousted before the end of his term. These two were sincere, they believed that freedom was useful. They were shown the error of their ways.

In 2000, the new president, Monsieur Bouteflika, having been called home by the army and forgetting about democracy about which he had made such stirring speeches in Parisian salons, offered an amnesty to the terrorists. Since then, the military, the oligarchs, the brothers of the president and the amnestied have been working together and earning large sums of money which they invest in London, Paris and Madrid, their preferred tax havens. Under Bouteflika’s rule, freedom of expression has withered as never before. The man governs like Putin, he does not imprison his critics, he does not torture or kill them, instead he creates a vacuum around them, and allows them to scream their hearts out. It is a painful and traumatic exercise, and the offenders eventually begin to think: better to be silent among people than to talk to oneself in the wilderness. Or they die in exile. Or perhaps they write eloquent novels, but its makes no difference; no-one in this country reads anymore.

This, in summary, is the entire history of freedom of expression in Algeria.

[1] bouchkara (from the Arabic meaning “the man with the bag”) means a police informant or a plain-clothes policeman. They were so called because those abducted and tortured had a bag placed over their heads.

[2] rampant police surveillance by the powerful Sécurité militaire, or Military Security

[3] a portmanteau word from the French barbe (beard) and F.L.N.

[4] Mohamed Boudiaf (1919–1992), one of the founders of the F.L.N. he was assassinated by one of his bodyguards shortly after becoming president.

Boualem Sansal is in the UK to launch the English translation of his book Harraga, winner of an English PEN award.

You can buy Harraga through our bookseller partner Foyles.

You can find also out more about Harraga.

Boualem will be appearing at the following events this November:

Wed 5 November, 18.30-19.30

Bristol Festival of Ideas

Foyles, 6 Quakers Friars, Cabot Circus, Bristol, BS1 3BU

Sarah LeFanu will interview Boualem, with Frank Wynne interpreting.

Thursday 6 November, 19.00

Kings Place, London

Boualem will appear with Frank Wynne. This will be chaired by Boyd Tonkin, Senior Writer, The Independent.

October 30, 2014
A Golden Age for the African Short Story

Over the past decade and a half, the Caine Prize has championed the finest short story writers that Africa has to offer, not only through giving a prize to the shortlist and winning story, but through the facilitation of workshops across the continent. Each year twelve or more up-and-coming African writers are invited to a workshop to compose a short story for inclusion in the anthology, which is then published annually by New Internationalist and seven co-publishers in Africa.

The Caine Prize was established in 1999 to award African creative writing and is named in honour of Sir Michael Caine, Chairman of Booker plc and the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. The Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English – a short story defined here as between 3,000 and 10,000 words long. An ‘African writer’ is normally taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African.

This year it took seven months for the record breaking 140 entries, from seventeen African countries, to be whittled down to the final winner. Five judges, chaired by Jackie Kay were given with the job. They were particularly impressed to see real originality with so many writers bringing something different to the form; they all agreed that this is a golden age for the African short story. Eight writers whose stories that didn’t make the shortlist received a letter of encouragement from the judges and some of these writers will be invited to take part in the workshop that takes place next year. The Caine Prize intends to continue holding writers workshops annually and, subject to funding, begin a series of editing workshops to improve editorial skills on the continent.

In April, after much deliberation, the 2014 shortlist was announced by Nobel Prize winner and Patron of the Caine Prize, Professor Wole Soyinka, as part of the opening ceremonies for the UNESCO World Book Capital 2014 celebration in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. To commemorate fifteen years of the Caine Prize this year, £500 was awarded to each shortlisted writer. It is hoped that this award will continue to be made annually.

The final judging process took place in Oxford on the day of the announcement. Announcing Okwiri as the winner, Jackie Kay praised the story, saying, ‘Okwiri Oduor is a writer we are all really excited to have discovered. ‘My Father’s Head’ is an uplifting story about mourning – Joycean in its reach. She exercises an extraordinary amount of control and yet the story is subtle, tender and moving. It is a story you want to return to the minute you finish it.’ ‘My Father’s Head’ explores the narrator’s difficulty in dealing with the loss of her father and looks at the themes of memory, loss and loneliness. The young woman works in an old people’s home in Kenya and comes into contact with a priest, giving her the courage to recall hidden memories of her father.

Okwiri lives in Nairobi, and has received a great amount of interest already from agents and publishers in the UK. She will take part in the Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi in September and the Ake Festival in Nigeria in November this year.

Similarly, the Caine Prize has brought African writers into the spotlight, discovering new talent and encouraging people to write – something the Western world often takes for granted. Okwiri noticed herself that ‘there are more Africans writing and more Africans reading and there’s a hunger for these kinds of stories.’ She added that she is ‘so hopeful and grateful about this thing we call African literature.’

Kenya’s leading newspaper The Daily Nation wrote, ‘Global recognition as comes with the Caine Prize should act as the foundation on which the great repertoire of work and talent on offer is rolled out to wider audiences.’ Over the past fifteen years, the Caine Prize has achieved this by launching the careers of esteemed winners such as Leila Aboulela, Binyavanga Wainaina and NoViolet Bulwayo.

We look forward to spotlighting the talents of hundreds of other African writers in years to come.

July 17, 2014
The translator as literary activist

Jethro Soutar writes for PEN Atlas on the urgent case of Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, the PEN-award-winning author whom he translates and whom he is now trying to help protect, as Juan faces persecution from the regime in Equatorial Guinea

Traduttore, traditore, they say. But far from being a traitor, the translator is often a writer’s closest ally. US soldier Matthew Zeller was in the midst of a fierce gun battle in Afghanistan when he was outflanked by two Taliban fighters: as they moved in for the kill, Zeller’s Afghan interpreter saw the danger and shot the insurgents dead. Zeller had to campaign for several years to secure a US visa for Janis Shinwari, his translator and saviour.The life of a literary translator is thankfully a lot less gory. Nevertheless, we are occasionally called upon to offer our authors a lifeline. This week, news reached me that Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, an Equatorial Guinean author whose novel By Night the Mountain Burns I translated for And Other Stories, was being pursued by his country’s dictatorial regime. Ávila Laurel and five others, including Salvador Ebang Ela, founder of Elefante y la Palmera, the Elephant and Palm Tree, a political party known for conducting peaceful protests against police brutality, had requested permission from the Provincial Government of Bioko Norte to hold a demonstration in Plaza Ewaiso E’pola on 23 February. The request was refused and followed by an announcement that Ebang El and his sympathisers were to be rounded up.When writers come under threat in their own countries, translators can act as a bridge to the outside world. Sometimes publicising what’s happening can make a real difference, letting writer and tormentor know that the rest of the world is watching. When Orhan Pamuk was formally charged with insulting Turkishness, Maureen Freely, his English-language translator, published as many articles as she could about the case in the international press.Shirley Lee translates from Korean and has focused her attention on exiled North Korean writers. She provides them with a lifeline simply by being interested in what they have to say, but she also has to coax and encourage them: it’s not easy expressing yourself freely if you’ve been conditioned to writing under the scrutiny of a repressive regime.Becoming a translator is not a political act in itself – Lee says she was drawn to North Korea by the peculiarities of the country’s language and literature, not its politics – but it’s hard not to be politicised by such exposure to tyrannical regimes.Pietro Zveteremich was political. He withdrew his membership from the Italian Communist Party after translating Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which was published in translation before it was ever published in Russian. The Soviet Union went to great lengths to try and prevent publication, even forcing Pasternak to sign a telegram sent to Zveteremich, asking him to withhold his translation. But Pasternak also sent Zveteremich a handwritten note saying precisely the opposite; Zveteremich licensed publication of his translation and the book was launched to great fanfare and acclaim.Pasternak and Pamuk were both given the Nobel Prize and the international prestige that goes with such awards can be vital in protecting writers from persecution at home. In the UK, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize provides prestige and some media coverage, while doing a sterling job in recognising the contribution of translators and championing translated works from distant lands.They don’t come much more distant than Annóbon Island, the setting for By Night the Mountain Burns. Annóbon is a remote island off the west coast of Africa, administered by Equatorial Guinea but periodically cut-off by the regime, for reasons of power and control.I first met Ávila Laurel in 2012 in Barcelona, where he’d fled after going on hunger strike in Equatorial Guinea, a protest against government oppression. We went for a drink in a bar in the Raval area that was run by another Guinean exile. It was a friendly place, but there was a sadness to it. As Ávila Laurel explained: ‘Barcelona’s a lovely city, but we’re not here out of choice.’ Critics of President Obiang’s regime are bullied into leaving as a matter of course, and Ávila Laurel had been proud of the fact that he’d stuck it out, that he was an outspoken writer living in Equatorial Guinea.I asked him whether he was working on anything in Barcelona and he said that he was: he was writing his memoirs, he said, to leave them in Barcelona when he flew back to Guinea, por si acaso… just in case.It was a chilling thing to be told: here was a man calmly preparing for the worst, yet determined to go home.And go home he did. He’s at home now in fact, literally so, for although he’s been advised to go into hiding, he refuses to do so: he’s done nothing wrong, so why should he hide? All the same, he’s been forced into keeping a low profile, to being confined to the neighbourhood and suspending his public work. He’s safe for now, but there’s no telling whether the danger has passed: Equatorial Guinea’s regime creates a climate of fear by making threats, real and veiled, and by following up on some of them.So it’s left to myself and David Shook, Ávila Laurel’s poetry translator, to stay alert and watch our author’s back: to act as his bridge and keep the world informed, por si acaso. About the authorJethro Soutar is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese. His translation of Hotel Brasil by Frei Betto will be published by Bitter Lemon Press, while By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel will be published by And Other Stories in the autumn. Both books were awarded a PEN Writers in Translation award. Soutar is currently editing a book of translated football-themed writing from Latin America, The Football Crónicas.About Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. His parents were from the remote Annobón Island, off the African coast. His books include the novel Avión de Ricos, Ladrón De Cerdos(The Pig Thief And The Rich Man’s Aeroplane) and the short story collection Cuentos Crudos (Raw Tales). Ávila Laurel has been a constant thorn in the side of his country’s long-standing dictatorial government. A nurse by profession, for many years he was one of the best known Equatorial Guinean writers not to have opted to live in exile. But, in 2011, after a week-long hunger strike in protest against Obiang’s regime, timed to coincide with the President of Spain’s visit to Equatorial Guinea, Ávila Laurel moved to Barcelona. He writes across all media, in particular as a blogger, essayist and novelist.Additional information By Night the Mountain Burns was awarded an English PEN translation grant. To further support the book’s publication, visit the And Other Stories website.Set on Annobón, a remote island off the West African coast governed by Equatorial Guinea but completely neglected by the government, By Night The Mountain Burns recounts the narrator’s childhood, growing up among countless siblings, several mothers, ever absent fathers and an unusual grandfather. We learn of the dark realities of island life: bush fires that destroy crops and threaten homesteads, cholera outbreaks, the sometimes uneasy marriage between folklore and religion and the imposition of an official language that is not their own and, which has very little context within their isolated world.By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is translated from Spanish by Jethro Soutar and will be published in November 2014. To support the publication of this book, subscribe by 5 March.Jethro Soutar wrote about Juan Tomás for the Guardian Books blog.David Shook, Juan Tomás’s poetry translator, writes about the current situation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.A panel of translators and human rights activists will be considering the role of the translator as ‘literary activist’ at this year’s London Book Fair. The discussion will take place on 10 April at 1pm.

February 27, 2014
Publishers’ highlights in 2014: part 1

Chase away those stormy blues with a new book for the new year. PEN Atlas asks UK publishers about the translated books they are excited about publishing in 2014 – an exciting list of books to look forward to this year, so clear your shelves! Publishers include Pushkin Press, Peirene, Istros Books and more, with a second installment from other publishers next week

Eric Lane – Dedalus

We have begun 2014 with Diego Marani’s first detective novel, God’s Dog, translated by Judith Landry, set in the near future with Italy a theocratic state ruled by the Vatican. Described as ‘energetic and trenchant’ in The Independent.February sees Before and During by Vladimir Sharov, translated by Oliver Ready. This is one of, if not the most, extraordinary novel we have ever published. My view of Stalin will never be the same again.In March there is the first English translation by Alan Yates of Raimon Casellas’ fin-de-siècle masterpiece Dark Vales. A Catalan classic full of darkness and foreboding.

Jane Lawson, Editorial Director – Doubleday

The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver by Chan Koonchung (May 2014, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman). Humorous and erotic Chinese road novel about the love life of a hapless drifter whose life is upturned when he falls in love with the statue of a young girl from Beijing- the second novel from the author of The Fat Years.

Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, Director – Istros Books

Hamam Balkania by Vladislav Bajac (Serbia) translated by Randall A Major – An ambitious look into the power structures of the Ottoman Empire, juxtaposed with musings on contemporary concepts of identity and faith. (January 2014)Mission London by Alek Popov (Bulgaria) translated by Daniela and Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de Lupe – Combining the themes of corruption, confusion and outright incompetence, Popov masterly brings together multiple plot lines in a sumptuous carnival of frenzy and futile vanity, allowing the illusions and delusions of post-communist society to be reflected in their glorious absurdity! (April 2014)Death in the Museum of Modern Art by Alma Lazarevska (Bosnia) translated by Celia Hawkesworth – Avoiding the easy traps of politics and blame, Lazarevska reveals a world full of incidents and worries so similar to our own, and yet always under the shadow of the snipers and the grenades of the Bosnian war. (June 2014)False Apocalypse by Fatos Lubonja (Albania) translated by John Hodgson – 1997, a tragic year in the history of post-communist Albania. This is one man’s story of how the world’s most isolated country emerged from Stalinist dictatorship and fell victim to a plague of corruption and flawed ‘pyramid’ financial schemes which brought the people to the edge of ruin. (October 2014)The Great War by Aleksandar Gatalica (Serbia) translated by Will Firth – In the centenary year of the start of WWI, we finally have a Serbian author taking on the themes of a war that was started by a Serb assassin’s bullet. Following the destinies of over seventy characters, on all warring sides, Gatalica depicts the destinies of winners and losers, generals and opera singers, soldiers and spies, in the conflict that marked the beginning of the Twentieth Century. (October 2014)

Rowan Cope, Senior Editor – Little Brown, Abacus and Virago

Here are our four highlights for fiction in translation in 2014 from across our lists – we’ve got some fantastic titles coming up.I’m hugely excited about Patrick Deville’s novel Plague and Cholera (Little, Brown hardback, Feb 2014, translated by J.A. Underwood), which is a rich, fascinating and gripping fictional portrait both of the real historical figure of Dr Alexandre Yersin, a game-changing microbiologist and explorer, and of the turbulent early years of the twentieth century. It was a notable bestseller and shortlisted for every major literary award in France.Spanish debut novelist Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera’s The Awakening of Miss Prim (Abacus, June 2014, translated by Sonia Soto) is a charming, quirky tale of love, literature, philosophy and the pleasure to be found in the little things in life – I hope it will appeal to readers who loved novels such as The Elegance of the Hedgehog.Malice by Keigo Higashino (Little, Brown, October 2014, translated by Alexander O. Smith): Malice is the most acclaimed novel in Keigo Higashino’s bestselling series featuring police detective Kyochiro Kaga. Kaga is one of the most popular creations of Japan’s bestselling novelist and appears in a dozen novels, several TV series and a handful of major motion picture adaptations.The Stone Boy by Sophie Loubière (February 2014, translated by Nora Mahoney): The Stone Boy is an award-winning and darkly atmospheric French psychological thriller with an unforgettable elderly heroine – Madame Préau.

Juliet Mabey, Publisher – Oneworld

We have a growing list of fiction in translation, which has been actively expanded over the last year with acquisitions from Korea, China, Israel, and Russia, and have a particularly strong list of translated novels for 2014.The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is one of the highlights of this year’s list. Written by the multi-award winning author Sun-Mi Hwang and translated by Chi-Young Kim, it has been on the Korea bestseller list continuously for more than a decade, selling in excess of two million copies. A modern fable-esque classic with strong philosophical themes, it features a spirited hen’s quest for freedom and self-determination, and has been compared to E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Illustrated by London-based Japanese artist Nomoco, it will launch in April at the London Book Fair where Hwang is Author of the Day as part of this year’s Korean Focus.The Space Between Us by Iranian bestselling author Zoya Pirzad and translated from the Persian by Amy Motlagh is publishing in February, a follow up to Things We Left Unsaid, which we published in 2012. Dubbed the Anne Tyler of Iran, [Pirzad has written] a poignant, wistful story about belonging and otherness, pride and prejudice, and brilliantly paints the Iranian landscape of complex social conventions and private emotional conflict.Revolution Street by Amir Cheheltan is translated from the Persian by Paul Sprachman and publishes in March. In this critically acclaimed and searing novel – Cheheltan’s first to be translated into English – power and corruption in post-revolutionary Iran are exposed through the actions of two men who scheme to exploit the chaos and confusion for their own benefit. Both torturers in one of Tehran’s most notorious prisons and in love with the same woman, their machinations take them deep into Tehran’s underworld of criminals and provocateurs, in an unusual tragi-comic tale of rivalry and revenge.The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron and translated from the Hebrew by Steven Cohen won the prestigious Bernstein Award in Israel, where it hit the bestseller lists on publication. Publishing here in November, and described by one reviewer as “probably the best political novel to be written in Israel”, it documents a warped and psychotic society in Israel’s Wild West – the establishment of a new settlement in the West Bank. A specialist at showing both sides of the equation, Gavron explores his subject with subtle complexity, humor and great insight into the human condition, portraying a multi-layered reality that encourages readers to make their own judgments.

Meike Ziervogel, Publisher – Peirene Press

In 2014 Peirene will publish its Coming-of-Age series, three stories about our individual struggles to reach maturity in an ever-changing world.The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfiled: A haunting tale about the environmental legacy of the Cold War. ‘Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground.’ Literary Review (February 2014)The Blue Room by Hanne Ortavik, translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin: A mother-daughter relationship that will send a chill down your spine. ‘A book for all daughters… A book that will get under your skin.’ Elle (June 2014)Under the Tripoli Sky by Kamal Ben Hameda, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. A fascinating portrait of a pre-Gaddafi Libyan society on the verge of change. ‘Neo-realistic characters that could have stepped straight out of a Vittorio de Sica film.’ Cultures Sud (September 2014)

Laura Barber, Editorial Director – Granta Books & Portobello Books

This year kicks off in sinister style with reissue of six books by the great Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia, whose powerful exploration of Sicily’s gritty criminal underworld shows him to be a master storyteller across a variety of literary genres, from novels and short stories to detective fiction and true crime.On a lighter note, the satirist Dimitri Verhulst imagines the consequences of the second coming in Christ’s Entry into Brussels (translated by David Colmer).In April, we have a new dispatch from the inimitable Jacek Hugo-Bader, whose Kolyma Diaries (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) record his vodka-fuelled experience of travelling 2000 kilometres through the former Soviet Gulag to meet the inhabitants of this grim land as they eke out an existence or transform themselves into oligarchs.And in May, we have Nightwork, a darkly comic coming-of-age story set during the Russian occupation from the celebrated Czech writer, Jáchym Topol, translated by Marek Tomin.Later in the year, we have A Short Stop on the Road From Auschwitz, a shattering literary memoir by Göran Rosenburg, the son of Holocaust survivors (translated from Swedish by Sarah Death), and Walter Kempowski’s Swansong ’45 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside), a monumental collection of first-hand accounts that brings to life the last days of World War II.Finally, in December, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) which is a story of the 20th century traced through the various possible lives of one woman and was last year’s winner of the Hans Fallada Prize.

Adam Freudenheim, Publisher and Managing Director – Pushkin Press

As a publisher specializing in fiction from around the world it’s always difficult to choose highlights for the year, so focussing on just two writers whose work appears with us in English for the first time this spring and with apologies to other Pushkin writers I’ve not been able to include, here goes.Song for an Approaching Storm by Peter Fröberg Idling is an atmospheric thriller set in one tense month in 1950s Cambodia. The story is told in three sections, each giving the perspective of one character in a love triangle. The rub comes in that one of the three is Saloth Sar, who twenty years later would become known to the world as Pol Pot. First published in Swedish in 2012, Song for an Approaching Storm is an original and moving debut novel beautifully translated by Peter Graves. (March 2014)Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda was a sensation on publication in Holland in 2010. It went to number one on the bestseller list, was nominated for every Dutch literary prize going – and won five of them – and is being translated into eight languages. Buwalda’s book is a family saga in which things go rather terribly wrong for one Dutch family in the 1990s and 2000s. Set in Holland, Beligium and California, Bonita Avenue is a terrific, page-turning book that – as one critic put it – feels like a cross between the work of Jonathan Franzen and Stieg Larsson! Jonathan Reeder has translated this larger-than-life debut novel. (April 2014)

January 9, 2014
Publishers' highlights in 2014: part 1

Chase away those stormy blues with a new book for the new year. PEN Atlas asks UK publishers about the translated books they are excited about publishing in 2014 – an exciting list of books to look forward to this year, so clear your shelves! Publishers include Pushkin Press, Peirene, Istros Books and more, with a second installment from other publishers next week

Eric Lane – Dedalus

We have begun 2014 with Diego Marani’s first detective novel, God’s Dog, translated by Judith Landry, set in the near future with Italy a theocratic state ruled by the Vatican. Described as ‘energetic and trenchant’ in The Independent.February sees Before and During by Vladimir Sharov, translated by Oliver Ready. This is one of, if not the most, extraordinary novel we have ever published. My view of Stalin will never be the same again.In March there is the first English translation by Alan Yates of Raimon Casellas’ fin-de-siècle masterpiece Dark Vales. A Catalan classic full of darkness and foreboding.

Jane Lawson, Editorial Director – Doubleday

The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver by Chan Koonchung (May 2014, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman). Humorous and erotic Chinese road novel about the love life of a hapless drifter whose life is upturned when he falls in love with the statue of a young girl from Beijing- the second novel from the author of The Fat Years.

Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, Director – Istros Books

Hamam Balkania by Vladislav Bajac (Serbia) translated by Randall A Major – An ambitious look into the power structures of the Ottoman Empire, juxtaposed with musings on contemporary concepts of identity and faith. (January 2014)Mission London by Alek Popov (Bulgaria) translated by Daniela and Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de Lupe – Combining the themes of corruption, confusion and outright incompetence, Popov masterly brings together multiple plot lines in a sumptuous carnival of frenzy and futile vanity, allowing the illusions and delusions of post-communist society to be reflected in their glorious absurdity! (April 2014)Death in the Museum of Modern Art by Alma Lazarevska (Bosnia) translated by Celia Hawkesworth – Avoiding the easy traps of politics and blame, Lazarevska reveals a world full of incidents and worries so similar to our own, and yet always under the shadow of the snipers and the grenades of the Bosnian war. (June 2014)False Apocalypse by Fatos Lubonja (Albania) translated by John Hodgson – 1997, a tragic year in the history of post-communist Albania. This is one man’s story of how the world’s most isolated country emerged from Stalinist dictatorship and fell victim to a plague of corruption and flawed ‘pyramid’ financial schemes which brought the people to the edge of ruin. (October 2014)The Great War by Aleksandar Gatalica (Serbia) translated by Will Firth – In the centenary year of the start of WWI, we finally have a Serbian author taking on the themes of a war that was started by a Serb assassin’s bullet. Following the destinies of over seventy characters, on all warring sides, Gatalica depicts the destinies of winners and losers, generals and opera singers, soldiers and spies, in the conflict that marked the beginning of the Twentieth Century. (October 2014)

Rowan Cope, Senior Editor – Little Brown, Abacus and Virago

Here are our four highlights for fiction in translation in 2014 from across our lists – we’ve got some fantastic titles coming up.I’m hugely excited about Patrick Deville’s novel Plague and Cholera (Little, Brown hardback, Feb 2014, translated by J.A. Underwood), which is a rich, fascinating and gripping fictional portrait both of the real historical figure of Dr Alexandre Yersin, a game-changing microbiologist and explorer, and of the turbulent early years of the twentieth century. It was a notable bestseller and shortlisted for every major literary award in France.Spanish debut novelist Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera’s The Awakening of Miss Prim (Abacus, June 2014, translated by Sonia Soto) is a charming, quirky tale of love, literature, philosophy and the pleasure to be found in the little things in life – I hope it will appeal to readers who loved novels such as The Elegance of the Hedgehog.Malice by Keigo Higashino (Little, Brown, October 2014, translated by Alexander O. Smith): Malice is the most acclaimed novel in Keigo Higashino’s bestselling series featuring police detective Kyochiro Kaga. Kaga is one of the most popular creations of Japan’s bestselling novelist and appears in a dozen novels, several TV series and a handful of major motion picture adaptations.The Stone Boy by Sophie Loubière (February 2014, translated by Nora Mahoney): The Stone Boy is an award-winning and darkly atmospheric French psychological thriller with an unforgettable elderly heroine – Madame Préau.

Juliet Mabey, Publisher – Oneworld

We have a growing list of fiction in translation, which has been actively expanded over the last year with acquisitions from Korea, China, Israel, and Russia, and have a particularly strong list of translated novels for 2014.The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is one of the highlights of this year’s list. Written by the multi-award winning author Sun-Mi Hwang and translated by Chi-Young Kim, it has been on the Korea bestseller list continuously for more than a decade, selling in excess of two million copies. A modern fable-esque classic with strong philosophical themes, it features a spirited hen’s quest for freedom and self-determination, and has been compared to E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Illustrated by London-based Japanese artist Nomoco, it will launch in April at the London Book Fair where Hwang is Author of the Day as part of this year’s Korean Focus.The Space Between Us by Iranian bestselling author Zoya Pirzad and translated from the Persian by Amy Motlagh is publishing in February, a follow up to Things We Left Unsaid, which we published in 2012. Dubbed the Anne Tyler of Iran, [Pirzad has written] a poignant, wistful story about belonging and otherness, pride and prejudice, and brilliantly paints the Iranian landscape of complex social conventions and private emotional conflict.Revolution Street by Amir Cheheltan is translated from the Persian by Paul Sprachman and publishes in March. In this critically acclaimed and searing novel – Cheheltan’s first to be translated into English – power and corruption in post-revolutionary Iran are exposed through the actions of two men who scheme to exploit the chaos and confusion for their own benefit. Both torturers in one of Tehran’s most notorious prisons and in love with the same woman, their machinations take them deep into Tehran’s underworld of criminals and provocateurs, in an unusual tragi-comic tale of rivalry and revenge.The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron and translated from the Hebrew by Steven Cohen won the prestigious Bernstein Award in Israel, where it hit the bestseller lists on publication. Publishing here in November, and described by one reviewer as “probably the best political novel to be written in Israel”, it documents a warped and psychotic society in Israel’s Wild West – the establishment of a new settlement in the West Bank. A specialist at showing both sides of the equation, Gavron explores his subject with subtle complexity, humor and great insight into the human condition, portraying a multi-layered reality that encourages readers to make their own judgments.

Meike Ziervogel, Publisher – Peirene Press

In 2014 Peirene will publish its Coming-of-Age series, three stories about our individual struggles to reach maturity in an ever-changing world.The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfiled: A haunting tale about the environmental legacy of the Cold War. ‘Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground.’ Literary Review (February 2014)The Blue Room by Hanne Ortavik, translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin: A mother-daughter relationship that will send a chill down your spine. ‘A book for all daughters… A book that will get under your skin.’ Elle (June 2014)Under the Tripoli Sky by Kamal Ben Hameda, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. A fascinating portrait of a pre-Gaddafi Libyan society on the verge of change. ‘Neo-realistic characters that could have stepped straight out of a Vittorio de Sica film.’ Cultures Sud (September 2014)

Laura Barber, Editorial Director – Granta Books & Portobello Books

This year kicks off in sinister style with reissue of six books by the great Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia, whose powerful exploration of Sicily’s gritty criminal underworld shows him to be a master storyteller across a variety of literary genres, from novels and short stories to detective fiction and true crime.On a lighter note, the satirist Dimitri Verhulst imagines the consequences of the second coming in Christ’s Entry into Brussels (translated by David Colmer).In April, we have a new dispatch from the inimitable Jacek Hugo-Bader, whose Kolyma Diaries (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) record his vodka-fuelled experience of travelling 2000 kilometres through the former Soviet Gulag to meet the inhabitants of this grim land as they eke out an existence or transform themselves into oligarchs.And in May, we have Nightwork, a darkly comic coming-of-age story set during the Russian occupation from the celebrated Czech writer, Jáchym Topol, translated by Marek Tomin.Later in the year, we have A Short Stop on the Road From Auschwitz, a shattering literary memoir by Göran Rosenburg, the son of Holocaust survivors (translated from Swedish by Sarah Death), and Walter Kempowski’s Swansong ’45 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside), a monumental collection of first-hand accounts that brings to life the last days of World War II.Finally, in December, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) which is a story of the 20th century traced through the various possible lives of one woman and was last year’s winner of the Hans Fallada Prize.

Adam Freudenheim, Publisher and Managing Director – Pushkin Press

As a publisher specializing in fiction from around the world it’s always difficult to choose highlights for the year, so focussing on just two writers whose work appears with us in English for the first time this spring and with apologies to other Pushkin writers I’ve not been able to include, here goes.Song for an Approaching Storm by Peter Fröberg Idling is an atmospheric thriller set in one tense month in 1950s Cambodia. The story is told in three sections, each giving the perspective of one character in a love triangle. The rub comes in that one of the three is Saloth Sar, who twenty years later would become known to the world as Pol Pot. First published in Swedish in 2012, Song for an Approaching Storm is an original and moving debut novel beautifully translated by Peter Graves. (March 2014)Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda was a sensation on publication in Holland in 2010. It went to number one on the bestseller list, was nominated for every Dutch literary prize going – and won five of them – and is being translated into eight languages. Buwalda’s book is a family saga in which things go rather terribly wrong for one Dutch family in the 1990s and 2000s. Set in Holland, Beligium and California, Bonita Avenue is a terrific, page-turning book that – as one critic put it – feels like a cross between the work of Jonathan Franzen and Stieg Larsson! Jonathan Reeder has translated this larger-than-life debut novel. (April 2014)

January 9, 2014