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  • The Freedom and Right to Share Our Stories: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on Decolonising Literature

    The Freedom and Right to Share Our Stories: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on Decolonising Literature

    Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai on decolonising literature about Việt Nam by writing in the language of the coloniser.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    A few years ago, I visited the New York Public Library and went through its list of tens of thousands of books in English about Việt Nam. I was astonished by how many of the books only focused on Việt Nam as a war, how many were written by Westerners who used Vietnamese people as the background to the Western stories, and how few of the titles were written by Vietnamese writers.

    In many of these books, and many Hollywood movies about Việt Nam, Vietnamese women are often reduced to Western stereotypes of Oriental women – exotic sexual objects, helpless victims, absent of trauma, without agency. Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Sympathizer, said recently in his commencement speech at Franklin and Marshall College:                      

    I watched almost all of Hollywood’s Việt Nam War movies, an exercise I recommend to no one, especially if you are Vietnamese. Việt Nam was our country, and this was our war, and yet our only place in American movies was to be killed, raped, threatened, or rescued. […] Like many other so-called minorities, we were distorted by stereotypes or erased by ignorance.

    This problematic representation of Vietnamese people is a product of colonisation that continues as a destructive mindset long after our liberation from foreign rule. It explains some of my motivations for writing my debut novel, The Mountains Sing, in English. As someone who only had the chance to learn English from the eighth grade, and who didn’t read literature in English until much later in life, writing it felt like climbing a high mountain barefoot. But I was compelled to write in English – the language of invasive military powers and cultures – to directly resist colonialist narratives and attitudes about Việt Nam. I wanted to insert a Vietnamese voice into the canon of literature in English, reclaim the Vietnamese narrative, place Vietnamese people in the centre of the narrative about Việt Nam, assert that Việt Nam is a culture and not a war, and represent Vietnamese women as complex human beings who take active roles in society while being the pillars of their families.

    Because language is power, I have been using the Vietnamese language as a subversive weapon, snuck into the English text. I don’t always translate Vietnamese words, giving instead the context needed for the reader to guess the meaning, inviting them to embrace Vietnamese culture, to learn new Vietnamese words, to appreciate the richness, colour, textures and rhythm of our language, and to arrive in Việt Nam not only with their mind, but also with their heart. In The Mountains Sing, the Vietnamese language stands proudly with its diacritical marks, unlike most books in English about Việt Nam, in which my mother tongue is stripped down. In my essay ‘Climbing Many Mountains’, which accompanies the novel, I wrote:

    By turning to the first page of The Mountains Sing, you will open the door into an authentic Việt Nam where proverbs are sprinkled throughout daily conversations, where lullabies and poems are sung. You will experience the colours, richness, and complexity of our culture, beginning with our Vietnamese names and language, which appear in full diacritical marks. Those marks might look strange at first, but they are as important as the roof of a home. The word ‘ma’, for example, can be written as ma, má, mà, mả, mạ, mã; each meaning very different things: ghost, mother, but, grave, young rice plant, horse. The word ‘bo’ can become bó, bỏ, bọ, bơ, bở, bờ, bô, bố, bồ, bổ (bunch, abandon, insect, butter, mushy, shore, chamber pot, father, mistress, nutritious).

    In choosing to retain the diacritical marks of my Vietnamese name, as well as the names of the 23 major and minor Vietnamese characters, I was refusing the norms of the English publishing industry and, in doing so, might have sacrificed the commercial success and popularity of my novel. But it would be a great disrespect to my language were I to have removed the diacritics, considering how integral they are for the meanings of each of my characters’ names – Diệu Lan, for example, means ‘precious orchid’, Hương means ‘fragrance’, and Tú means ‘refined beauty’.

    Colonisation takes many forms. Eliminating or distorting aspects of a nation’s culture or customs for the convenience of a dominating culture is one of them. Thus, I believe it was colonisation that stripped away Vietnamese’s diacritical marks, to serve the eyes and ears of Western readers. Now, it is time for the publishing industry to decolonise literature about Việt Nam and return the diacritics to our language. For that, I salute Algonquin Books, and more than 15 other publishers who have bought the translation rights of The Mountains Sing for joining me in my mission.

    The most powerful enabler of colonisation is dehumanisation, and I have fought to humanise Vietnamese people, along with those from other cultures. In The Mountains Sing, my poetry collection The Secret of Hoa Sen, and my forthcoming novel Dust Child, my Amerasian, Vietnamese and American characters value and celebrate life and cherish their families, just like the people of other nations. Việt Nam is often misunderstood because we are often seen through the lenses of the wars we had to fight in: we were colonised for nearly a thousand years by different Chinese empires, and fought several wars of resistance against the Mongols, before being invaded and occupied by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans. Our colonisers divided our country and our people and tried to reduce us to pitiful victims who didn’t deserve to live. In Hearts and Minds, a 1974 American documentary film directed by Peter Davis, General Westmoreland – former commander of US forces in Việt Nam – showed his colonist and racist attitudes by stating: ‘The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.’

    If Westmoreland had met Grandma Diệu Lan and Hương from The Mountains Sing, what would he say of their love for life and the many sacrifices they made for their family? Would he be able to look them in the eyes and tell them that life was cheap for the Vietnamese?

    ‘Americans, and Europeans, have imagined the Vietnam War as a racial and sexual fantasy that negates the war’s political significance and Vietnamese subjectivity and agency,’ said Viet Thanh Nguyen, regarding the popular Broadway musical Miss Saigon, in which the main Vietnamese character Kim is portrayed as sexual and desperate. Kim suffers silently, has no agency, and longs for an American G.I. to save her. When she finds out she cannot live in America, she commits suicide: ‘For her,’ Diep Tran said, ‘being dead is better than being Vietnamese.’

    In Dust Child, readers will meet Trang and Quỳnh, two sisters who contradict the image of Kim in Miss Saigon. Trang and Quỳnh did not rely on their American boyfriends to save them; they take charge of their own destinies. Though Trang is a bar girl and a sex worker, she writes her own poetry, loves to read, and can recite from memory sections from Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều, an epic poem containing 3,254 verses. Dust Child depicts how trauma resulting from war, violence, discrimination, abuse, and abandonment affects Vietnamese, American and Amerasian children who were born into relationships between American soldiers and Vietnamese women. More importantly, it shows the courage of individuals trying to break away from the cycles of intergenerational trauma and offer healing to themselves and to those around them.

    The road to decolonising literature in English about Việt Nam is long and arduous but I am not alone. I stand beside Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese writers who are doing extraordinary work in correcting misperceptions about Việt Nam and our people; I stand beside our readers, booksellers, and literary champions who are uplifting my work and sharing it with enthusiasm. It gives me hope for a future in which all cultures and ethnic groups are respected for who we are and have the freedom and the right to share our stories, without the need to modify any aspect of our storytelling to serve another group of people.

    Born and raised in Việt Nam, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of the international bestseller The Mountains Sing, runner-up for the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction. She has published twelve books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese and English and has received some of the top literary prizes in Việt Nam including the Poetry of the Year 2010 from the Hà Nội Writers Association. Her writing has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in major publications including the New York Times. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring women of 2021. Her second novel in English, Dust Child, is forthcoming in March 2023. For more information, visit: www.nguyenphanquemai.com

    Photo credit: Tapu Javeri

  • How Korean it is

    If it’s a truism that translation is also and inevitably an act of interpretation, it can also be a misleading one. The translation doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, produce an interpretation; rather, it needs to ensure that the multiple possibilities of the original are there for its new readers to find, while still leaving these readers space for their own interpretations, which will be shaped by cultural and political frameworks, but equally by individual experiences of both life and literature. The translator (like the editor, the cover designer, the publicist) has to tread a fine line, contextualising certain cultural particularities without being overly prescriptive as to how the book is read and understood.

    This is especially the case for a novel like The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s brutally poetic triptych of taboo and transgression. It’s not so much the main character Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat (though in South Korea this is still rare enough to be subversive in itself) as her refusal to explain herself which provokes such varied, and often violent, responses in those around her – a salaryman husband, a video artist brother-in-law, a dutiful older sister. By filtering her central character through these multiple lenses, Han allows Yeong-hye a radical passivity which challenges Eurocentric notions of what a ‘protagonist’ ought to be – precisely the notions which have long seen Korean literature criticised as ‘lacking agency’. Just as Yeong-hye acts as a vessel for her family’s own fears, preconceptions, and repressed desires, so too the book itself invites widely divergent interpretations as to its overall attitude and ‘meaning’ – between individuals, but also between cultures. But if this is part of the reason that The Vegetarian has already proved such a successful crosser of borders – having already been translated as far afield as Poland and Vietnam, Argentina and Portugal – it also poses certain challenges for the translator.

    How, then, at the same time as leaving room for this diversity of interpretation, to ensure that the translation gives English readers an experience as close as possible to that of the book’s original audience? Luckily, The Vegetarian gives the translator plenty of non-culture-specific features to be ‘faithful’ to. First was the considerable poetry of the writing – one of the distinctive features of Han’s prose, unsurprisingly so given that she’s also a published poet (and previously wrote on ‘My Literary Forms’ for PEN Atlas). It’s probably due to this double life that the mood of a given piece by her is always distilled for me into a specific image, which is a particularly useful thing for a translator to latch onto. In the case of The Vegetarian, originally published in South Korea as three separate novellas, each section of the triptych has its own distinct mood: clipped and matter-of-fact, a starched white shirt buttoned all the way to the top; fevered desire undercut with pathos, and experienced at one crucial remove; finally, bleached exhaustion, the blurred outlines of stark trees glimpsed through a grey wash of rain.

    But if this combination of style and tone forms a core that can hopefully ensure a unity of experience for readers otherwise separated by language, what about the diversity of interpretation? During the editing process, in which Han was a meticulous and humble participant, I learned about some of the ways the book had already been interpreted by translators into other languages. Some of these were fairly obvious – that Vietnamese publishers had felt the patriarchal family dynamic would form an easy point of identification for their market; or that the sexual content, unusually explicit for a South Korean novel, had been received as fairly sensational by that original audience (something which the director of the Korean film adaptation later played up in his promotional materials, much to Han’s chagrin – she felt that this focus on the sexual element was misleadingly reductive). Other readings were surprising and hadn’t occurred to me, though I could instantly see the logic behind them. When I was stuck on how to translate the epithet ‘May Priest’, in which ‘May’ refers to the May 1980 massacre in Han’s home city of Gwangju, Han wondered if the Polish translator’s choice of ‘Santa Maria’ might work for a UK audience. This led into a discussion of how a historically Catholic country like Poland would likely see Yeong-hye’s renunciation as a self-sacrificial mortification of the flesh, starving herself into some kind of near-religious and saintly ecstasy. Buddhism, on the other hand, which has deep roots in Korea and still flourishes there today, would see it as a quieter attempt at sloughing off the violence inherent in the human animal (without privileging her own interpretive framework over any other, Han mentioned to me during our discussion that she herself is a Buddhist).

    Our thoughts turned to how the book’s reception might differ in the UK, where, for example, readers would be unlikely to have an automatic appreciation of the rigid, Confucian hierarchy of social relations. As much as possible, I chose to retain the Korean practice of using relational titles (e.g. ‘my sister-in-law’s husband’, ‘Ji-woo’s mum’) rather than referring to people by their names. Given the surge of interest in feminism here in the UK, it seemed both inevitable and problematic that The Vegetarian would be seen as ‘representative’ of Korean women’s writing in particular – something Han experienced first-hand at last year’s London Book Fair, where she was lumped on an all-women panel discussing ‘Families and Relationships’ (the men got to talk about Politics and Art). A feminist reading will see Yeong-hye as a young woman asserting absolute control over her own body, a radical renunciation of the role South Korea’s conformist, patriarchal society has carved out for her. Which, of course, is no less right or wrong than any of the other possible interpretations, but which does run the risk of simplification, of reading the book as more of a socio-anthropological report than as literature. In the second section, where she allows her video-artist brother-in-law to paint flowers onto her body, Yeong-hye nevertheless seems to exert an uncanny power over this disturbed, fevered man. The question this invites – how far Yeong-hye is using those around her to effect her own transformation – is as troubling in its context of mental illness as it is in that of sexual politics; were more of Han’s work available in English, Anglophone readers would be more likely to read her explorations of desire and passivity as an exploration of the elision between artist and artwork. This elision could stem equally from her long-standing preoccupation with the figure of the artist and the nature of the artistic process as from her ‘Koreanness’ or gender.

    Of course, my translation choices have to respect the author’s intentions, and the gulf between how English and Korean work, which meant a lot of time spent finding syntactical/semantic options that would have the same effect, using a completely different feature of the original language. In the first section, for example, I chose to insert a number of adverbs (‘completely’, ‘naturally’, etc) that would hopefully make Yeong-hye’s husband sound both pedantic and self-exonerating, while the main challenge for the middle act was getting the sexual language right – not too purple, but not too clinical either. But my longest exchange with Han was prompted by the final page, where Yeong-hye’s older sister says to her ‘surely the dream isn’t all there is?’ Han was anxious that the speaker’s uncertainty comes through here, and I had to explain why, unlike in Korean, in English ‘surely’ gives the impression more of the speaker trying to convince herself than of any actual assurance.

    Above all, Han Kang wanted her book to provoke, to disturb, to ask questions that each reader will have to answer for themselves. I can only hope my translation does the same.

    The subject of the piece,  Han Kang, was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She has published collections of short stories including Love in Yeosu, A Yellow Patterned Eternity, and The Fruits of My Woman as well as novels including Your Cold Hand, Black Deer, Greek Lessons, and The Vegetarian.

  • Publishers' translation highlights 2015

    Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories

    It’s an exciting year for our translated fiction — as well as the year of our first British debut fiction (from Niyati Keni and Angela Readman). We have two new titles in translation from authors we have published already: Carlos Gamerro (in March The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón, a hilariously satirical novel that takes in business inspirational books and Argentine guerrilleros) and Oleg Pavlov (in July Requiem for a Soldier, a very dark absurd humour in the last days of the Soviet empire), as well as the following five authors previously untranslated in English:

    SJ Naudé has translated his own Afrikaans stories in The Alphabet of Birds. Published this month, the stories have been highly praised by many writers and are on their way to entering the canon of South African literature.

    In March we will publish our first of three upcoming novels from the much-talked-about young Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. Signs Preceding the End of the World (translated by Lisa Dillman) is a novel about a translator in some ways: the main character, Makina, has national and language borders to cross and must come to terms with how this changes her.

    In April comes the Swiss writer Anne Cuneo’s Tregian’s Ground (translated by Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie). This historical novel is also a remarkable, cross-border story, this time of the copyist and compiler of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Francis Tregian. In danger as a Catholic in the Elizabethan Age, he journeys across Europe, befriending Shakespeare, swapping scores with Byrd and Monteverdi, and playing in the French court.

    Haroldo Conti’s Southeaster (translated by Jon Lindsay Miles) is long overdue in English. Conti’s writing won major prizes and was praised by Gabriel García Márquez and Eduardo Galeano among others in the 70s, before he was ‘disappeared’ at the age of fifty-one by the Argentine dictatorship. Southeaster, the first of his books to be translated into English, is about a man drifting with odd jobs and a boat in the Paraná Delta.

    Susana Moreira Marques’ Now and at the Hour of our Death (translated by Julia Sanches) was the single book that most excited our readers in our Portuguese reading groups since 2011. We all fell in love with its beautiful, genre-defying approach. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to a forgotten old corner of northern Portugal. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own reflections. It brilliantly combines the spirit of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage.

    Bill Swainson, Bloomsbury

    Reckless by Hasan Ali Toptaş (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and John Angliss) – March.  Hasan Ali Toptaş is one of Turkey’s leading writers. His books have won many prizes, including the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and Yunus Nadai Novel Prize and have been widely translated though not published in English. Reckless (published in Turkish in 2013) is the story of a man fleeing the spiralling chaos of the big city in search of serenity in an Anatolian village of which he has heard dreamlike tales from an old army friend. But the village is no simple idyll and the mystery of just what he did on the Turkish/Syrian border 30 years earlier that places his friend in his debt eludes him.

    The All Saints’ Day Lovers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean) – May.  Achingly sad and exquisitely crafted, the seven stories in The All Saints’ Day Lovers together form an artistic whole, united by theme, mood, intense emotion and the starkly beautiful landscape of the Ardennes. ‘One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature’ Mario Vargas Llosa

    The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads by Patrick Modiano – August. The first three novels that the 2014 Nobel Laureate published in France, when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene at the end of the ’60s challenging the Gaullist myths, form a trilogy of the Occupation and evoke the city of that time, with its mystery, complicity and moral ambivalence. The Trilogy sees the first publication in English of La Place de l’Étoile (translated by Frank Wynne) alongside The Night Watch (translated by Patricia Wolf) and Ring Roads (translated by Caroline Hillier).

    Geoff Mulligan, Clerkenwell

    Gone to Ground by Marie Jalowicz Simonis the remarkable story of a young Jewish woman’s survival in Berlin through the Second World War. It is coming out in February and is translated by Anthea Bell.

    Eric Lane, Dedalus

    The Interpreter by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry follows on from New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs and forms a trilogy of novels on the theme of language and identity. The Interpreter is both a quest and a thriller, and at times a comic picaresque caper around Europe but also deals with the profound issues of existence.

    What Became of the White Savage by Francois Garde, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins is also a novel about language and identity and the need to belong. Based on a true story of a sailor who is abandoned in 19-th c Australia and spends 17 years living as an aborigine and when he is found and taken back to France cannot readjust to so-called civilised life. In France it won 9 literary prizes including the Goncourt in the first novel category.

    Lightheaded by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Andrew Bromfield is a zany, anarchic black comedy which satirises life in contemporary Russia. At its heart is the question what is important in life and what sacrifices an individual should be expected to make for the good of others. Winner of the Debut Prize.

    Ink in the Blood by Stephane Hochet, translated by Mike Mitchell. An artist gets his first tattoo and finds his whole being changes, what he feels and especially how he relates to women in this atmospheric and spine-chilling Euro short.

    Daniela Petracco, Europa Editions

    The book I’m most looking forward to publishing this year is The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante in Ann Goldstein’s accomplished translation.  The fourth and final instalment of the celebrated Neapolitan novels will be published in September.

    We are also adding some new authors to our list: Greek author Fotini Tsalikoglou with her melancholic novella The Secret Sister, out this month in Mary Kitroeff’s translation; French author Anna Gavalda with Billie, the urgently-told, inspiring story of two survivors, a novel that spent months in the number 1 spot on the French best seller lists last year and has been translated into 30 languages and counting. The English translation is by Jennifer Rappaport.

    In the Summer we’ll be publishing the first novel by none other than Nobel Laureate, actor and dramatist Dario Fo: The Pope’s Daughter, translated by Antony Shugaar, re-tells the story of Lucrezia and the Borgias as a shocking mirror image for the uses and abuses of power in our own time.

    Also in the Summer, a rediscovered classic by Jewish Austrian author Ernst Lothar, who, like his friend and associate Stefan Zweig, was forced to leave Vienna and seek exile abroad in the last years before WW2.  The Vienna Melody tells the story of a family of piano makers from the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Austria’s Nazi takeover of 1938.  We are reissuing the original 1948 translation by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood.

    Another title I much look forward to is the new novel by the young and gifted Viola Di Grado. The Hollow Heart, translated by Antony Shugaar, tells the story of a suicide – before, during and after – told in forensic, heart-breaking detail.

    In our World Noir series, we have new crime novels by Carlotto, Mallock, de Giovanni, and an exciting debut: The Night of the Panthers by Piergiorgio Pulixi is the first in a series that will explore organised crime and police corruption.

    Jacques Testard, Fitzcarraldo Editions

    The first translated book we publish this year is My Documents (April) by the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell), his fourth to appear in English. The previous three were short novels, written with the author’s trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy. My Documents, which is, on the surface, a collection of stories, is his longest work yet. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of the mercurial godson, this novel in fragments evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. In the words of Adam Thirlwell, ‘these stories are graceful, grave, comical, disabused. I guess what I mean is: My Documents represents a new form. When I think about Alejandro Zambra, I feel happy for the future of fiction.’

    In June, we publishe Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good, a collection of free verse and essays by ‘Russia’s first authentic post-Soviet author’ (Keith Gessen). Widely published and critically acclaimed as a poet, Medvedev is also a prominent political activist and a member of the Russian Socialist movement ‘Vpered’ [Forward]. His small press, the Free Marxist Publishing House, has recently released his translations of Pasolini, Eagleton, and Goddard, as well as numerous books on the intersection of literature, art and politics. Medvedev has also taken the unusual step of renouncing copyright — only pirated editions, no contracts. It’s No Good includes selected poems from his first four books of poetry as well as his most significant essays.  A collective of translators — Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich — worked on the various texts.

    Following on from our launch title, Zone, published in August 2014, we publish Mathias Enard’s novel Street of Thieves in August 2015, once again brilliantly translated by Charlotte Mandell. It tells the story of Lakhdar, a young Tangerine who finds himself exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Meryem. A bildungsroman set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Street of Thieves is also a story about immigration, and draws on a wealth of literary influences – Bowles, Choukri, Genet and Burroughs, to name a few.

    Jane Aitken, Gallic Books

    In February we are tremendously excited to publish best-selling Algerian author Yasmina Khadra’s novel The African Equation, translated by Howard Curtis. The story centres around Kurt, a Frankfurt doctor held hostage in East Africa whose view of the continent is challenged by a fellow captive. Khadra’s vivid imagining of the demise of Colonel Gaddafi, The Dictator’s Last Night, translated by Julian Evans, will follow in October.

    April sees the publication of The Red Notebook, the much-anticipated new novel by The President’s Hat author Antoine Laurain. Translated in-house by Emily Boyce, we have a special attachment to this quirky, romantic tale with a bookseller hero who attempts to track down a woman based on the contents of her bag – which mysteriously include a signed copy of a novel by famously reclusive Nobel winner Patrick Modiano.

    Anne Berest’s fictionalised biography Sagan, Paris 1954, out in June, draws a portrait of 18-year-old Françoise Sagan as her debut novel Bonjour Tristesse is poised to propel her to fame. The translator, Heather Lloyd, recently translated the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Bonjour Tristesse, so was the ideal choice for this intimate account of the novel’s continued relevance.

    Then in September comes our first foray into graphic novels, and what a way to start: Stéphane Heuet’s beautifully illustrated adaptation of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’, translated by Harvard academic Arthur Goldhammer. This ambitious project will give Proust-lovers a different way to approach the text, and, we hope, encourage new readers to discover it for themselves.

    Max Porter, Granta & Portobello

    We start the year with The Vegetarian by Han Kang (January, translated by Deborah Smith), a remarkable and unsettling novel about taboo and metamorphosis. It’s an essential read for anybody interested in illness, performance and trauma. It is also notable for Deborah Smith’s beautiful and intuitive translation.

    In March we have the mesmeric new novel by Man Booker International nominated Peter Stamm, All Days are Night (translated by Michael Hofmann). It tells the story of a perfect life that is violently shattered by tragedy. Like all Stamm’s work it is unadorned, insightful and quietly devastating.

    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by Swedish economist and journalist Katrine Marçal (March, translated by Saskia Vogel) is an engaging and thought-provoking look at economics, equality and the mess we are in. As the general election approaches and the gender pay gap widens, it’s time we brought feminism and economics together.

    Valeria Luiselli, author of Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd returns in April with a sparklingly intelligent and raucous comic novel The Story of My Teeth (translated by Christina McSweeney). Just in time for the Mexico market focus at LBF 2015 one of Latin America’s rising literary stars leaps into wonderfully flamboyant storytelling mode.

    Other highlights from Granta and Portobello in 2015 include The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret (July, translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, Anthony Berris), a life-affirming collection of tragicomic essays by the author the New York Times called ‘a genius’.

    We have a previously unpublished collection of essays by the great Joseph Roth, called The Hotel Years, writings from inter-war Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine, by turns poignant, witty and unsettling  (September, translated by Michael Hofmann).

    Also in September Portobello Books will publish The Strange Case of Thomas Quick by Dan Josefsson (translated by Anna Paterson), the riveting story of a prisoner who posed as the worst serial killer in Swedish history, and the psychoanalyst who shaped the investigation.

    In November we publish Walter Kempowski’s last, great, novel All for Nothing (translated by Anthea Bell) a towering masterpiece of post-war German fiction comparable to Roth, Fallada and Grass, which also calls to mind Rachel Seiffert’s Dark Room and Richard Bausch’s Peace.

    Michal Shavit, Harvill Secker

    This year at Harvill Secker we have an incredibly strong selection of fiction in translation : An electrifying debut, Jesús Carrasco, Out in the Open, to be published in April. Beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa it tells the story of a boy in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A closed world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. It has been a huge best-seller in Spain and Holland and it marks the arrival of a major new Spanish writer.

    We are also excited to welcome to the list Mia Couto in August. It is an understatement to describe Mia Couto as Mozambique’s greatest novelist – he is in fact one of the most outstanding authors to have emerged in Africa’s post-colonial history. Based on a true story, Confession of the Lioness, translated by David Brookshaw, is set in the rural village of Kulumani as it is being besieged by killer lions. As the inevitable encounter with the lions approaches, the hidden tensions in the village are gradually exposed and the real theme of the novel becomes apparent: the war is not between man and nature but between the village’s patriarchal traditions and its long suffering women.

    And last but certainly not least, this March we are publishing the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s phenomenal My Struggle series, translated by Don Bartlett: Dancing in the Dark. 18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove moves to a remote Norwegian fishing village to work as a teacher. All goes well to begin with. But as the nights grow longer, Karl Ove’s life takes a darker turn. Drinking causes him blackouts and romantic adventures end in humiliation. As the New York Times Book Review put it: ‘Why would you read a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to’.

    Susan Curtis, Istros Books

    We have seven lucky titles lined up for you in 2015: we start the year with Croatian poet Olja Savicevic’s beautiful debut novel, Farewell Cowboy, followed by a collection of hard-hitting short prose pieces exploring the female condition in Turkey in Ciler Ilhan’s Exile – winner of the European Prize for Literature. We also have another EU prize winner in the Slovenian writer, Gabriela Babnik and an unusual love story set in Africa, Dry Season. Dream and nightmare are the themes of Evald Flisar‘s psychologically challenging novel, My Father’s Dreams, whereas fairy tales are the playground for Macedonian writer, Aleksandar Prokopiev in his collection for adults – Homunculus. We will also be treated to the final instalment of Andrej Nikolaidis‘ informal ‘Olchinium Trilogy’ – Till Kingdom Come and get to taste one of the biggest Balkan hits in recent years: Yugoslavia, My Country by Goran Vojnovic.

    Katharina Bielenberg, MacLehose Press

    O. Enquist’s The Wandering Pine (January, translated by Deborah Bragan Turner)

    In this venerated Swedish novelist gives us his life in the third person, as a national highjumper, as a journalist during the 1972 Munich Olympic hostage crisis, as a playwright who had the most tremendous Broadway flop, and as an alcoholic whose disease almost destroyed him. A startlingly bold autobiography.

    In Evelio Rosero’s Feast of the Innocents (January, translated by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom), a doctor chooses Carnival as the perfect arena in which to explode the myth of Simon Bolívar once and for all. A magical, exuberant riot of a book set in Colombia’s southern city of Pasto.

    Elias Khoury’s The Broken Mirrors/Sinalcol (translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies) tells the story of two brothers divided by difference and civil war, between Beirut and France. Thought provoking, rich in language and character, beautiful constructed, another powerful novel from the Lebanese writer.

    With The Heart of Man (February, translated by Philip Roughton) Icelander Jón Kalman Stefánsson concludes his sublime trilogy, a profound exploration of life in the extreme north and its most crucial elements: love, food, warmth, literature – but most of all, love.

    Karim Miské’s Arab Jazz (February, translated by Sam Gordon) is a fast-paced crime novel from Paris’ 19th arrondissement that goes to the heart of religious extremism and the violence it can inspire. Recent horrific events in Paris are to some extent reflected in this novel by the Franco-Mauritanian documentary film-maker. Miské visits the UK in February for a series of events supported by PEN Promotes.

    Borders by Roy Jacobsen (March, translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) is a gripping story of impossible choices in a theatre of total war, where family love, national identity, even military genius, count for nothing as the doomed German 6th
    Army fights for Stalingrad in WWII.

    Leica Format (translated by Celia Hawkesworth) by Croatian writer Daša Drndiƈ – author of Trieste – is a tale of cities, of how the past merges with the present, and of what constitutes a homeland. A narrative of poignant, vivid fragments and images that combine to form a haunting study of history and the processes by which we describe, remember, or falsify it.

    Fall of Man in Wilmslow by David Lagercrantz (May, translated from Swedish by George Goulding) explores the repressive atmosphere of Cold War Britain through the death and life of revolutionary mathematician Alan Turing. Lagercrantz’s writing is so clever and engaging that complex mathematical theorems become crystal clear. He is also the author of the continuation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (coming in August)

    Later in the year we look forward to two novels by incumbent Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano (A Pedigree and So That You Don’t Lose Yourself in the Quartier), and novels by Andreï Makine, Peter Terrin and Norbert Gstrein, as well as Pierre Lemaitre’s 2013 Goncourt Prize-winner, the first in a magnum opus.

    Juliet Mabey, Oneworld

    We will be adding four novels to our growing list of fiction in translation, the first of which is A Perfect Crime by A Yi, translated from the Chinese by Anna Holmwood. A bored high school student murders his best friend to relieve the daily tedium of existence, and so begins a stylish psychological suspense novel, the literary love child of Camus’ The Stranger, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Kafka’s The Trial. Offering both a vision of China’s heart of darkness – the despair that traps the rural poor and the incoherent rage lurking behind their phlegmatic front – and a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense, this novel is generously supported by a PEN Award for translation and promotion.

    In July we are publishing a Norwegian YA novel in our new imprint, Rock the Boat. Minus Me, written by Ingelin Rossland and translated by Deborah Dawkin, follows a young terminally ill teenager as she completes her bucket list and ultimately comes to terms with leaving.

    In October we are very excited to be publishing the critically acclaimed, multiple award-winning Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Lisa Hayden. Winner of both the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana Awards in 2013 and shortlisted for several others, this huge novel has been dubbed Russia’s The Name of the Rose. An enthralling chronicle of the Russian Middle Ages, a doomed love affair, and an epic journey all in one life-affirming, sprawling fable.

    And in November we are publishing the multiple award-winning French novel Meursault, Contre-enquete by Algerian journalist and writer Kamel Daoud, translated by Sandra Smith. This highly acclaimed debut is a powerful, lyrical, and politically charged re-imagining of The Outsider, narrated by the brother of the nameless Arab killed in Camus’ iconic novel, and is already a huge bestseller in France. It has won numerous accolades including the Prix François-Mauriac of the Académie Française and the Prix des Cinq Continents, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in French literature.

    Meike Ziervogel, Peirene Press

    Peirene only publishes three books a year and I curate them in series. 2015 is Peirene’s year of Chance Encounter: Meeting The Other. A stunning Finnish tale about the human will to survive (White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen, translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah), a French love story about the art of reading (Reader for Hire by Jean Raymond, translated by Adriana Hunter), and a Norwegian drama about two middle-aged sisters whose existence is turned upside down when a stranger enters their lives (The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen, translated by John Irons).

    Amelia Fairney, Penguin

    Drone Theory, by Gregoire Chamayou, translated by Janet Lloyd. Beautifully argued, passionate and coherent, this is an urgent and important polemic that blends philosophy with reportage as it grapples with one of the most pressing issues in the world today: robot warfare

    Blood-drenched Beard, by Daniel Galera, translated by Alison Entrekin (paperback). This sultry, alluring and atmospheric novel by Brazilian rising star Daniel Galera is made all the more mysterious and compelling by the protagonist’s unusual disorder: he is unable to recognize the faces of any of the people he meets.

    Frog, by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt (paperback). The latest novel by the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, Frogoffers a moving and eye-opening insight into Chinese society and the far-reaching reverberations of the one-child policy

    Paul Baggaley, Picador

    Monica Sabolo’s All This Has Nothing To Do With Me , translated by Georgina Collins, is an original, extremely funny and darkly moving glimpse into the depths of one woman’s psyche, and a delicious piece of Parisian comedy. When journalist ‘MS’ interviews the mysterious ‘XX’ for a job at her magazine, she hires him straight away – because he is gorgeous. As one date leads to another, her obsession spirals whilst the object of her affection remains aloof. There is voyeurism here, and the addiction of any glossy magazine, but the prose is also sublime – sharp, graceful and charming. And MS herself is a wonderfully sympathetic character. She has a wry awareness of how ridiculous her behaviour is even as it spins out of control, and she never takes herself too seriously; there is a touch of a 21st century Bridget Jones to her in this respect.

    One Hundred Days of Happiness, translated by Tony Shugaar is Italian film director Fausto Brizzi’s gorgeously funny and sweetly sad story about the last one hundred days in the life of Lucio Battistini. Lucio’s simple life takes a tumble when an indiscretion at work gets him thrown out of the apartment he shares with his wife and children.  That’s when he receives the news that he is seriously ill, an three months left to live. Lucio decides he must live his last days to the full, and there’s a lot to do. He wants to win his wife back and travel with his children, he needs to let everybody know how happy he was, in spite of everything. This novel has a fun-loving, roguish Italian charm to it and despite the inevitably sad ending it’s really about celebrating love and friendship, and it’s endlessly uplifting for that.

    Wilful Disregard, translated by Sarah Death, is Lena Andersson’s August Prize-winning novel about one Ester Nilsson, a sensible person in a sensible relationship. That is until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself sits in the audience, spellbound, and, when the two meet afterwards, he has the same effect on her. This short, sharp novel is just brilliant, a sort of dark love story about desperate devotion and total self-betrayal and self-delusion. It’s cuttingly, sometimes cruelly funny and written with whip-smart panache and precision.

    A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler and translated by Charlotte Collins. The new novel from Austrian writer Robert Seethaler sold 100,000 copies in German last year. It is the story of one man’s life – his loves, battles, consolations and regrets – set in the Alps, as the modern world begins to erode the old ways. Told with dignity, humility and great beauty, it has been compared with John Williams’ STONER.

    The Sense of an Elephant  by Marco Missiroli, translated by Stephen Twilley is a powerful story of paternal love and hidden lives, set in a palazzo in Milan. Pietro arrives with a battered suitcase to take up the job as concierge, and from the outset shows a special interest in Dr Luca Martini and his family. Soon he’s letting himself into their apartment while everyone is out. What is the secret that binds the two men? This is a charming, atmospheric novel and it won Italy’s Campiello Prize in 2012.

    Adam Freudenheim, Pushkin Press

    At the end of January we publish the debut novel by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch (translation by Sondra Silverston).  This sensuous, whimsical and moving love story fuses personal lives and epic history.  It’s a true delight!

    At the end of February we are thrilled to publish, in a unique, reverse back-to-back edition, Karate Chop & Minna Needs Rehearsal Space by Dorthe Nors (translations by Marin Aitken and Misha Hoekstra).  This collection of stories and novella by Danish writer Dorthe Nors marks the appearance in English of one of the most original writers I know of.  These two books will knock your socks off, quite simply.

    At the end of March we publish the powerful allegorical novel The Boy Who Stole Atilla’s Horse by Ivan Repila, a young Spanish writer (translation by Sophie Hughes).  Atilla has echoes of Beckett and Cormac McCarthy but is a very much its own thing – a fable for the early 21st century of a Europe in decline.

    Pushkin Children’s Books releases early this year include The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine by Akiyuki Nosaka (translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori) – wartime Japan like you’ve never read about it before – and the Brazilian bestseller Fuzz McFlops by Eva Furnari, a charming tale of a depressed one-eared rabbit who happens to be a writer, too.  And in September we’re thrilled to be publishing the sequel to The Letter for the King – The Secrets of the Wild Wood by Tonke Dragt (translation by Laura Watkison, who has been shortlisted for this year’s Marsh Award).

    Hannah Westland, Serpent’s Tail

    Serpent’s Tail is starting the year with a debut novel by a really exciting Finland Swedish writer called Philip Teir who has been compared to Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen – The Winter War (translated by Tiina Nunally) is a brilliantly funny, sharp, moving account of the demise of a family over the course of one winter, taking place in Helsinki and London. We’ve then got Leonora (translated by Amanda Hopkinson), a fictionalised account of the life of the great surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, by Elena Poniatowska, who was a friend of Carrington’s over many decades and is Mexico’s greatest living writer. In May we’re publishing Alain Mabanckou’s The Lights of Pointe Noire (translated by Helen Stevenson), a beautiful meditation on homecoming and how the Congo has changed since his childhood. And in November we’re planning to shock everyone with Danish debut Am I Cold by Copenhagen’s enfant terrible Martin Kongstad (translated by Martin Aitken) – this furious satire on art, marriage and late capitalism set in a Denmark teetering on the edge of financial crisis is hilarious, fearless, and cuts like a knife.

    Hannah Westland, Tuskar Rock

    In 2015 we begin publishing Tuskar Rock Press’s wonderful books. Starting with Antonio Munoz Molina’s masterpiece of the Spanish civil war, IN THE NIGHT OF TIME (translated by Edith Grossman) in March, and followed by the inimitable László Krasznahorkai’s new novel SEIOBO THERE BELOW (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) in August.

  • Publishers’ translation highlights 2015

    Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories

    It’s an exciting year for our translated fiction — as well as the year of our first British debut fiction (from Niyati Keni and Angela Readman). We have two new titles in translation from authors we have published already: Carlos Gamerro (in March The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón, a hilariously satirical novel that takes in business inspirational books and Argentine guerrilleros) and Oleg Pavlov (in July Requiem for a Soldier, a very dark absurd humour in the last days of the Soviet empire), as well as the following five authors previously untranslated in English:

    SJ Naudé has translated his own Afrikaans stories in The Alphabet of Birds. Published this month, the stories have been highly praised by many writers and are on their way to entering the canon of South African literature.

    In March we will publish our first of three upcoming novels from the much-talked-about young Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. Signs Preceding the End of the World (translated by Lisa Dillman) is a novel about a translator in some ways: the main character, Makina, has national and language borders to cross and must come to terms with how this changes her.

    In April comes the Swiss writer Anne Cuneo’s Tregian’s Ground (translated by Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie). This historical novel is also a remarkable, cross-border story, this time of the copyist and compiler of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Francis Tregian. In danger as a Catholic in the Elizabethan Age, he journeys across Europe, befriending Shakespeare, swapping scores with Byrd and Monteverdi, and playing in the French court.

    Haroldo Conti’s Southeaster (translated by Jon Lindsay Miles) is long overdue in English. Conti’s writing won major prizes and was praised by Gabriel García Márquez and Eduardo Galeano among others in the 70s, before he was ‘disappeared’ at the age of fifty-one by the Argentine dictatorship. Southeaster, the first of his books to be translated into English, is about a man drifting with odd jobs and a boat in the Paraná Delta.

    Susana Moreira Marques’ Now and at the Hour of our Death (translated by Julia Sanches) was the single book that most excited our readers in our Portuguese reading groups since 2011. We all fell in love with its beautiful, genre-defying approach. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to a forgotten old corner of northern Portugal. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own reflections. It brilliantly combines the spirit of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage.

    Bill Swainson, Bloomsbury

    Reckless by Hasan Ali Toptaş (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and John Angliss) – March.  Hasan Ali Toptaş is one of Turkey’s leading writers. His books have won many prizes, including the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and Yunus Nadai Novel Prize and have been widely translated though not published in English. Reckless (published in Turkish in 2013) is the story of a man fleeing the spiralling chaos of the big city in search of serenity in an Anatolian village of which he has heard dreamlike tales from an old army friend. But the village is no simple idyll and the mystery of just what he did on the Turkish/Syrian border 30 years earlier that places his friend in his debt eludes him.

    The All Saints’ Day Lovers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean) – May.  Achingly sad and exquisitely crafted, the seven stories in The All Saints’ Day Lovers together form an artistic whole, united by theme, mood, intense emotion and the starkly beautiful landscape of the Ardennes. ‘One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature’ Mario Vargas Llosa

    The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads by Patrick Modiano – August. The first three novels that the 2014 Nobel Laureate published in France, when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene at the end of the ’60s challenging the Gaullist myths, form a trilogy of the Occupation and evoke the city of that time, with its mystery, complicity and moral ambivalence. The Trilogy sees the first publication in English of La Place de l’Étoile (translated by Frank Wynne) alongside The Night Watch (translated by Patricia Wolf) and Ring Roads (translated by Caroline Hillier).

    Geoff Mulligan, Clerkenwell

    Gone to Ground by Marie Jalowicz Simonis the remarkable story of a young Jewish woman’s survival in Berlin through the Second World War. It is coming out in February and is translated by Anthea Bell.

    Eric Lane, Dedalus

    The Interpreter by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry follows on from New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs and forms a trilogy of novels on the theme of language and identity. The Interpreter is both a quest and a thriller, and at times a comic picaresque caper around Europe but also deals with the profound issues of existence.

    What Became of the White Savage by Francois Garde, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins is also a novel about language and identity and the need to belong. Based on a true story of a sailor who is abandoned in 19-th c Australia and spends 17 years living as an aborigine and when he is found and taken back to France cannot readjust to so-called civilised life. In France it won 9 literary prizes including the Goncourt in the first novel category.

    Lightheaded by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Andrew Bromfield is a zany, anarchic black comedy which satirises life in contemporary Russia. At its heart is the question what is important in life and what sacrifices an individual should be expected to make for the good of others. Winner of the Debut Prize.

    Ink in the Blood by Stephane Hochet, translated by Mike Mitchell. An artist gets his first tattoo and finds his whole being changes, what he feels and especially how he relates to women in this atmospheric and spine-chilling Euro short.

    Daniela Petracco, Europa Editions

    The book I’m most looking forward to publishing this year is The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante in Ann Goldstein’s accomplished translation.  The fourth and final instalment of the celebrated Neapolitan novels will be published in September.

    We are also adding some new authors to our list: Greek author Fotini Tsalikoglou with her melancholic novella The Secret Sister, out this month in Mary Kitroeff’s translation; French author Anna Gavalda with Billie, the urgently-told, inspiring story of two survivors, a novel that spent months in the number 1 spot on the French best seller lists last year and has been translated into 30 languages and counting. The English translation is by Jennifer Rappaport.

    In the Summer we’ll be publishing the first novel by none other than Nobel Laureate, actor and dramatist Dario Fo: The Pope’s Daughter, translated by Antony Shugaar, re-tells the story of Lucrezia and the Borgias as a shocking mirror image for the uses and abuses of power in our own time.

    Also in the Summer, a rediscovered classic by Jewish Austrian author Ernst Lothar, who, like his friend and associate Stefan Zweig, was forced to leave Vienna and seek exile abroad in the last years before WW2.  The Vienna Melody tells the story of a family of piano makers from the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Austria’s Nazi takeover of 1938.  We are reissuing the original 1948 translation by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood.

    Another title I much look forward to is the new novel by the young and gifted Viola Di Grado. The Hollow Heart, translated by Antony Shugaar, tells the story of a suicide – before, during and after – told in forensic, heart-breaking detail.

    In our World Noir series, we have new crime novels by Carlotto, Mallock, de Giovanni, and an exciting debut: The Night of the Panthers by Piergiorgio Pulixi is the first in a series that will explore organised crime and police corruption.

    Jacques Testard, Fitzcarraldo Editions

    The first translated book we publish this year is My Documents (April) by the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell), his fourth to appear in English. The previous three were short novels, written with the author’s trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy. My Documents, which is, on the surface, a collection of stories, is his longest work yet. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of the mercurial godson, this novel in fragments evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. In the words of Adam Thirlwell, ‘these stories are graceful, grave, comical, disabused. I guess what I mean is: My Documents represents a new form. When I think about Alejandro Zambra, I feel happy for the future of fiction.’

    In June, we publishe Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good, a collection of free verse and essays by ‘Russia’s first authentic post-Soviet author’ (Keith Gessen). Widely published and critically acclaimed as a poet, Medvedev is also a prominent political activist and a member of the Russian Socialist movement ‘Vpered’ [Forward]. His small press, the Free Marxist Publishing House, has recently released his translations of Pasolini, Eagleton, and Goddard, as well as numerous books on the intersection of literature, art and politics. Medvedev has also taken the unusual step of renouncing copyright — only pirated editions, no contracts. It’s No Good includes selected poems from his first four books of poetry as well as his most significant essays.  A collective of translators — Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill and Bela Shayevich — worked on the various texts.

    Following on from our launch title, Zone, published in August 2014, we publish Mathias Enard’s novel Street of Thieves in August 2015, once again brilliantly translated by Charlotte Mandell. It tells the story of Lakhdar, a young Tangerine who finds himself exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Meryem. A bildungsroman set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Street of Thieves is also a story about immigration, and draws on a wealth of literary influences – Bowles, Choukri, Genet and Burroughs, to name a few.

    Jane Aitken, Gallic Books

    In February we are tremendously excited to publish best-selling Algerian author Yasmina Khadra’s novel The African Equation, translated by Howard Curtis. The story centres around Kurt, a Frankfurt doctor held hostage in East Africa whose view of the continent is challenged by a fellow captive. Khadra’s vivid imagining of the demise of Colonel Gaddafi, The Dictator’s Last Night, translated by Julian Evans, will follow in October.

    April sees the publication of The Red Notebook, the much-anticipated new novel by The President’s Hat author Antoine Laurain. Translated in-house by Emily Boyce, we have a special attachment to this quirky, romantic tale with a bookseller hero who attempts to track down a woman based on the contents of her bag – which mysteriously include a signed copy of a novel by famously reclusive Nobel winner Patrick Modiano.

    Anne Berest’s fictionalised biography Sagan, Paris 1954, out in June, draws a portrait of 18-year-old Françoise Sagan as her debut novel Bonjour Tristesse is poised to propel her to fame. The translator, Heather Lloyd, recently translated the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Bonjour Tristesse, so was the ideal choice for this intimate account of the novel’s continued relevance.

    Then in September comes our first foray into graphic novels, and what a way to start: Stéphane Heuet’s beautifully illustrated adaptation of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’, translated by Harvard academic Arthur Goldhammer. This ambitious project will give Proust-lovers a different way to approach the text, and, we hope, encourage new readers to discover it for themselves.

    Max Porter, Granta & Portobello

    We start the year with The Vegetarian by Han Kang (January, translated by Deborah Smith), a remarkable and unsettling novel about taboo and metamorphosis. It’s an essential read for anybody interested in illness, performance and trauma. It is also notable for Deborah Smith’s beautiful and intuitive translation.

    In March we have the mesmeric new novel by Man Booker International nominated Peter Stamm, All Days are Night (translated by Michael Hofmann). It tells the story of a perfect life that is violently shattered by tragedy. Like all Stamm’s work it is unadorned, insightful and quietly devastating.

    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by Swedish economist and journalist Katrine Marçal (March, translated by Saskia Vogel) is an engaging and thought-provoking look at economics, equality and the mess we are in. As the general election approaches and the gender pay gap widens, it’s time we brought feminism and economics together.

    Valeria Luiselli, author of Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd returns in April with a sparklingly intelligent and raucous comic novel The Story of My Teeth (translated by Christina McSweeney). Just in time for the Mexico market focus at LBF 2015 one of Latin America’s rising literary stars leaps into wonderfully flamboyant storytelling mode.

    Other highlights from Granta and Portobello in 2015 include The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret (July, translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen, Anthony Berris), a life-affirming collection of tragicomic essays by the author the New York Times called ‘a genius’.

    We have a previously unpublished collection of essays by the great Joseph Roth, called The Hotel Years, writings from inter-war Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine, by turns poignant, witty and unsettling  (September, translated by Michael Hofmann).

    Also in September Portobello Books will publish The Strange Case of Thomas Quick by Dan Josefsson (translated by Anna Paterson), the riveting story of a prisoner who posed as the worst serial killer in Swedish history, and the psychoanalyst who shaped the investigation.

    In November we publish Walter Kempowski’s last, great, novel All for Nothing (translated by Anthea Bell) a towering masterpiece of post-war German fiction comparable to Roth, Fallada and Grass, which also calls to mind Rachel Seiffert’s Dark Room and Richard Bausch’s Peace.

    Michal Shavit, Harvill Secker

    This year at Harvill Secker we have an incredibly strong selection of fiction in translation : An electrifying debut, Jesús Carrasco, Out in the Open, to be published in April. Beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa it tells the story of a boy in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A closed world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. It has been a huge best-seller in Spain and Holland and it marks the arrival of a major new Spanish writer.

    We are also excited to welcome to the list Mia Couto in August. It is an understatement to describe Mia Couto as Mozambique’s greatest novelist – he is in fact one of the most outstanding authors to have emerged in Africa’s post-colonial history. Based on a true story, Confession of the Lioness, translated by David Brookshaw, is set in the rural village of Kulumani as it is being besieged by killer lions. As the inevitable encounter with the lions approaches, the hidden tensions in the village are gradually exposed and the real theme of the novel becomes apparent: the war is not between man and nature but between the village’s patriarchal traditions and its long suffering women.

    And last but certainly not least, this March we are publishing the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s phenomenal My Struggle series, translated by Don Bartlett: Dancing in the Dark. 18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove moves to a remote Norwegian fishing village to work as a teacher. All goes well to begin with. But as the nights grow longer, Karl Ove’s life takes a darker turn. Drinking causes him blackouts and romantic adventures end in humiliation. As the New York Times Book Review put it: ‘Why would you read a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to’.

    Susan Curtis, Istros Books

    We have seven lucky titles lined up for you in 2015: we start the year with Croatian poet Olja Savicevic’s beautiful debut novel, Farewell Cowboy, followed by a collection of hard-hitting short prose pieces exploring the female condition in Turkey in Ciler Ilhan’s Exile – winner of the European Prize for Literature. We also have another EU prize winner in the Slovenian writer, Gabriela Babnik and an unusual love story set in Africa, Dry Season. Dream and nightmare are the themes of Evald Flisar‘s psychologically challenging novel, My Father’s Dreams, whereas fairy tales are the playground for Macedonian writer, Aleksandar Prokopiev in his collection for adults – Homunculus. We will also be treated to the final instalment of Andrej Nikolaidis‘ informal ‘Olchinium Trilogy’ – Till Kingdom Come and get to taste one of the biggest Balkan hits in recent years: Yugoslavia, My Country by Goran Vojnovic.

    Katharina Bielenberg, MacLehose Press

    O. Enquist’s The Wandering Pine (January, translated by Deborah Bragan Turner)

    In this venerated Swedish novelist gives us his life in the third person, as a national highjumper, as a journalist during the 1972 Munich Olympic hostage crisis, as a playwright who had the most tremendous Broadway flop, and as an alcoholic whose disease almost destroyed him. A startlingly bold autobiography.

    In Evelio Rosero’s Feast of the Innocents (January, translated by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom), a doctor chooses Carnival as the perfect arena in which to explode the myth of Simon Bolívar once and for all. A magical, exuberant riot of a book set in Colombia’s southern city of Pasto.

    Elias Khoury’s The Broken Mirrors/Sinalcol (translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies) tells the story of two brothers divided by difference and civil war, between Beirut and France. Thought provoking, rich in language and character, beautiful constructed, another powerful novel from the Lebanese writer.

    With The Heart of Man (February, translated by Philip Roughton) Icelander Jón Kalman Stefánsson concludes his sublime trilogy, a profound exploration of life in the extreme north and its most crucial elements: love, food, warmth, literature – but most of all, love.

    Karim Miské’s Arab Jazz (February, translated by Sam Gordon) is a fast-paced crime novel from Paris’ 19th arrondissement that goes to the heart of religious extremism and the violence it can inspire. Recent horrific events in Paris are to some extent reflected in this novel by the Franco-Mauritanian documentary film-maker. Miské visits the UK in February for a series of events supported by PEN Promotes.

    Borders by Roy Jacobsen (March, translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) is a gripping story of impossible choices in a theatre of total war, where family love, national identity, even military genius, count for nothing as the doomed German 6th
    Army fights for Stalingrad in WWII.

    Leica Format (translated by Celia Hawkesworth) by Croatian writer Daša Drndiƈ – author of Trieste – is a tale of cities, of how the past merges with the present, and of what constitutes a homeland. A narrative of poignant, vivid fragments and images that combine to form a haunting study of history and the processes by which we describe, remember, or falsify it.

    Fall of Man in Wilmslow by David Lagercrantz (May, translated from Swedish by George Goulding) explores the repressive atmosphere of Cold War Britain through the death and life of revolutionary mathematician Alan Turing. Lagercrantz’s writing is so clever and engaging that complex mathematical theorems become crystal clear. He is also the author of the continuation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (coming in August)

    Later in the year we look forward to two novels by incumbent Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano (A Pedigree and So That You Don’t Lose Yourself in the Quartier), and novels by Andreï Makine, Peter Terrin and Norbert Gstrein, as well as Pierre Lemaitre’s 2013 Goncourt Prize-winner, the first in a magnum opus.

    Juliet Mabey, Oneworld

    We will be adding four novels to our growing list of fiction in translation, the first of which is A Perfect Crime by A Yi, translated from the Chinese by Anna Holmwood. A bored high school student murders his best friend to relieve the daily tedium of existence, and so begins a stylish psychological suspense novel, the literary love child of Camus’ The Stranger, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Kafka’s The Trial. Offering both a vision of China’s heart of darkness – the despair that traps the rural poor and the incoherent rage lurking behind their phlegmatic front – and a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense, this novel is generously supported by a PEN Award for translation and promotion.

    In July we are publishing a Norwegian YA novel in our new imprint, Rock the Boat. Minus Me, written by Ingelin Rossland and translated by Deborah Dawkin, follows a young terminally ill teenager as she completes her bucket list and ultimately comes to terms with leaving.

    In October we are very excited to be publishing the critically acclaimed, multiple award-winning Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Lisa Hayden. Winner of both the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana Awards in 2013 and shortlisted for several others, this huge novel has been dubbed Russia’s The Name of the Rose. An enthralling chronicle of the Russian Middle Ages, a doomed love affair, and an epic journey all in one life-affirming, sprawling fable.

    And in November we are publishing the multiple award-winning French novel Meursault, Contre-enquete by Algerian journalist and writer Kamel Daoud, translated by Sandra Smith. This highly acclaimed debut is a powerful, lyrical, and politically charged re-imagining of The Outsider, narrated by the brother of the nameless Arab killed in Camus’ iconic novel, and is already a huge bestseller in France. It has won numerous accolades including the Prix François-Mauriac of the Académie Française and the Prix des Cinq Continents, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in French literature.

    Meike Ziervogel, Peirene Press

    Peirene only publishes three books a year and I curate them in series. 2015 is Peirene’s year of Chance Encounter: Meeting The Other. A stunning Finnish tale about the human will to survive (White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen, translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah), a French love story about the art of reading (Reader for Hire by Jean Raymond, translated by Adriana Hunter), and a Norwegian drama about two middle-aged sisters whose existence is turned upside down when a stranger enters their lives (The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen, translated by John Irons).

    Amelia Fairney, Penguin

    Drone Theory, by Gregoire Chamayou, translated by Janet Lloyd. Beautifully argued, passionate and coherent, this is an urgent and important polemic that blends philosophy with reportage as it grapples with one of the most pressing issues in the world today: robot warfare

    Blood-drenched Beard, by Daniel Galera, translated by Alison Entrekin (paperback). This sultry, alluring and atmospheric novel by Brazilian rising star Daniel Galera is made all the more mysterious and compelling by the protagonist’s unusual disorder: he is unable to recognize the faces of any of the people he meets.

    Frog, by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt (paperback). The latest novel by the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, Frogoffers a moving and eye-opening insight into Chinese society and the far-reaching reverberations of the one-child policy

    Paul Baggaley, Picador

    Monica Sabolo’s All This Has Nothing To Do With Me , translated by Georgina Collins, is an original, extremely funny and darkly moving glimpse into the depths of one woman’s psyche, and a delicious piece of Parisian comedy. When journalist ‘MS’ interviews the mysterious ‘XX’ for a job at her magazine, she hires him straight away – because he is gorgeous. As one date leads to another, her obsession spirals whilst the object of her affection remains aloof. There is voyeurism here, and the addiction of any glossy magazine, but the prose is also sublime – sharp, graceful and charming. And MS herself is a wonderfully sympathetic character. She has a wry awareness of how ridiculous her behaviour is even as it spins out of control, and she never takes herself too seriously; there is a touch of a 21st century Bridget Jones to her in this respect.

    One Hundred Days of Happiness, translated by Tony Shugaar is Italian film director Fausto Brizzi’s gorgeously funny and sweetly sad story about the last one hundred days in the life of Lucio Battistini. Lucio’s simple life takes a tumble when an indiscretion at work gets him thrown out of the apartment he shares with his wife and children.  That’s when he receives the news that he is seriously ill, an three months left to live. Lucio decides he must live his last days to the full, and there’s a lot to do. He wants to win his wife back and travel with his children, he needs to let everybody know how happy he was, in spite of everything. This novel has a fun-loving, roguish Italian charm to it and despite the inevitably sad ending it’s really about celebrating love and friendship, and it’s endlessly uplifting for that.

    Wilful Disregard, translated by Sarah Death, is Lena Andersson’s August Prize-winning novel about one Ester Nilsson, a sensible person in a sensible relationship. That is until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself sits in the audience, spellbound, and, when the two meet afterwards, he has the same effect on her. This short, sharp novel is just brilliant, a sort of dark love story about desperate devotion and total self-betrayal and self-delusion. It’s cuttingly, sometimes cruelly funny and written with whip-smart panache and precision.

    A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler and translated by Charlotte Collins. The new novel from Austrian writer Robert Seethaler sold 100,000 copies in German last year. It is the story of one man’s life – his loves, battles, consolations and regrets – set in the Alps, as the modern world begins to erode the old ways. Told with dignity, humility and great beauty, it has been compared with John Williams’ STONER.

    The Sense of an Elephant  by Marco Missiroli, translated by Stephen Twilley is a powerful story of paternal love and hidden lives, set in a palazzo in Milan. Pietro arrives with a battered suitcase to take up the job as concierge, and from the outset shows a special interest in Dr Luca Martini and his family. Soon he’s letting himself into their apartment while everyone is out. What is the secret that binds the two men? This is a charming, atmospheric novel and it won Italy’s Campiello Prize in 2012.

    Adam Freudenheim, Pushkin Press

    At the end of January we publish the debut novel by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch (translation by Sondra Silverston).  This sensuous, whimsical and moving love story fuses personal lives and epic history.  It’s a true delight!

    At the end of February we are thrilled to publish, in a unique, reverse back-to-back edition, Karate Chop & Minna Needs Rehearsal Space by Dorthe Nors (translations by Marin Aitken and Misha Hoekstra).  This collection of stories and novella by Danish writer Dorthe Nors marks the appearance in English of one of the most original writers I know of.  These two books will knock your socks off, quite simply.

    At the end of March we publish the powerful allegorical novel The Boy Who Stole Atilla’s Horse by Ivan Repila, a young Spanish writer (translation by Sophie Hughes).  Atilla has echoes of Beckett and Cormac McCarthy but is a very much its own thing – a fable for the early 21st century of a Europe in decline.

    Pushkin Children’s Books releases early this year include The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine by Akiyuki Nosaka (translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori) – wartime Japan like you’ve never read about it before – and the Brazilian bestseller Fuzz McFlops by Eva Furnari, a charming tale of a depressed one-eared rabbit who happens to be a writer, too.  And in September we’re thrilled to be publishing the sequel to The Letter for the King – The Secrets of the Wild Wood by Tonke Dragt (translation by Laura Watkison, who has been shortlisted for this year’s Marsh Award).

    Hannah Westland, Serpent’s Tail

    Serpent’s Tail is starting the year with a debut novel by a really exciting Finland Swedish writer called Philip Teir who has been compared to Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen – The Winter War (translated by Tiina Nunally) is a brilliantly funny, sharp, moving account of the demise of a family over the course of one winter, taking place in Helsinki and London. We’ve then got Leonora (translated by Amanda Hopkinson), a fictionalised account of the life of the great surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, by Elena Poniatowska, who was a friend of Carrington’s over many decades and is Mexico’s greatest living writer. In May we’re publishing Alain Mabanckou’s The Lights of Pointe Noire (translated by Helen Stevenson), a beautiful meditation on homecoming and how the Congo has changed since his childhood. And in November we’re planning to shock everyone with Danish debut Am I Cold by Copenhagen’s enfant terrible Martin Kongstad (translated by Martin Aitken) – this furious satire on art, marriage and late capitalism set in a Denmark teetering on the edge of financial crisis is hilarious, fearless, and cuts like a knife.

    Hannah Westland, Tuskar Rock

    In 2015 we begin publishing Tuskar Rock Press’s wonderful books. Starting with Antonio Munoz Molina’s masterpiece of the Spanish civil war, IN THE NIGHT OF TIME (translated by Edith Grossman) in March, and followed by the inimitable László Krasznahorkai’s new novel SEIOBO THERE BELOW (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) in August.

  • 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.

     

  • My Literary Form(s)

    In the run-up to London Book Fair 2014, where Korea is the market focus, Han Kang writes about women that turn into plants, the intuitive process in choosing between prose and poetry, and what the future holds for her writing

    Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

    In Spring 1997, I published a short story called “The Fruit of my Woman”. It was about a woman who starts to notice green blotches on her body, signalling that she is gradually becoming a plant, and about the man who lives with her, who ends up planting her in a pot on their balcony and watering her. She withers as winter sets in, disgorging a handful of tiny fruit. The story ends with the man clutching the fruit as he stares vacantly out from their balcony.

    Immediately after writing the story, I thought that I might like to return to this idea in the future. Rather than fleshing out a backstory, I wanted to write a longer work which would allow for variations on the theme, as in a piece of music. It wasn’t until I’d published two full-length novels, which I’d already been planning, that I was able to get started on what eventually became my third novel, The Vegetarian, published in 2007.

    The Vegetarian is made up of three parts, originally published in Korea as separate novellas; the first part is the one which shares a similar form to “The Fruit of My Woman”, in that it’s narrated from the husband’s point of view, with the voice of the protagonist, Yeong-hye, haunting the narrative in a series of monologues. But the tone and atmosphere are completely different. Unlike in “The Fruit of my Woman”, there are no paranormal events. The husband’s narration is chillingly matter-of-fact, and the nightmares which Yeong-hye’s monologues recount are particularly gruesome. Her hazardous attempt to ‘become vegetable – a pure being’ in order to vomit out ‘the violence of flesh/the human’ is constantly misunderstood as it progresses towards destruction. By the third part, “Flaming Trees”, Yeong-hye is refusing all food other than meat, believing that she is turning into a plant. The trees appear to blaze up like fireworks as the ambulance rushes her to the general hospital, in an agonising variation of the conclusion to “The Fruit of my Woman” – the withering of the tree-woman as winter approaches.

    The novel took me three slow years to write. In the final year, when I wrote “Flaming Trees”, I also wrote a lot of poetry. In-hye, who watches over her younger sister Yeong-hye in “Flaming Trees”, is having trouble sleeping, disturbed by a recurring dream. In this dream she is standing in front of the mirror. Blood runs from the reflection of her eye. She raises her hand to wipe the blood away, but her reflected self remains stock-still, and the eye carries on bleeding. That year, thinking of those suffering sisters, I wrote a seven-poem cycle called “Bleeding Eye”. I also wrote several poems featuring plant imagery.

    In this way, for me, poetry, short stories and novels are all closely intertwined.  So far, I’ve published three short story collections and five novels. Last year, my first poetry collection came out. Out of the hundred-plus poems I’d written, I chose sixty, and arranged them into five sections; I was able discern a similar feeling uniting those poems written while I was also writing a particular novel. Of course, these poems are independent from prose fiction, but they had undoubtedly been influenced by the questions and emotions that I’d lived with, the images that had absorbed me, while I was writing my novels.

    I’m sometimes asked about the difference between writing poetry, short stories, and novels. I’ll usually also be asked what makes me choose a given form. This process is extremely personal and intuitive, and so it isn’t easy to clarify – the only thing I can say with any certainty is that the most obvious difference is that of time. You need at least a week when writing a short story, twenty days at most, whereas if you want to write a novel you’ll need over a year (my fourth novel took me four and a half years to complete). Poetry, by contrast, can be written in a very short amount of time. Of course, some poems end up nagging away at you for quite some time, but this can’t be compared with the labour-intensive work of producing a novel, which involves a strict routine of writing a fixed amount every day.

    Selecting which form to use is a slightly more complex issue. When I write a novel I focus on internal questions. Questions are what motivates me to write; if I want take those questions as far as they can go, to see them through to the end, I need the novel’s tenacity. On the other hand, the idea for a short story will come to me as a single scene. I start to write and when I arrive at that scene, the one that gave me the idea in the first place, I know the story has come to its natural conclusion. A poem’s deepest connection is to language. It will come to me as a single line, which usually forms the beginning of the poem, but sometimes ends up in the middle or at the end. These intuitive flashes find their way to me whenever I’m unwell, or have to move house, when the flow of my life is interrupted by the trivial or significant. The year when I wrote the most poetry was the year when I felt most insecure. I wasn’t sleeping properly, didn’t have the concentration necessary for prose, and lines of poetry kept running around in my head. These eventually morphed into a play, so one afternoon I picked up my pen and turned it into a verse drama. The play would take an hour to read or perform, but took five hours to set down because I was limited by the speed of physical writing. Once I’d managed to drag that slow parade of images out of my head and onto paper I was utterly exhausted, but I also felt that I’d finally turned a corner.

    I first published poetry and short stories when I was twenty three. Now that twenty years have flown by, I’m moving forwards slowly but surely, trying to maintain a precarious balance between everyday life and writing. Now, while putting the final touches to my sixth novel, to be published in June, I’m also taking notes of ideas for short stories so I can get started on them in the summer, and of the next novel, which I’ll begin in autumn. Sometimes poetry demands to be written, and brings other work to a halt to create a breathing space for itself.

    Now and then I feel that I have nothing to fear, since, whatever the circumstances, I still somehow manage to write. Even when I find myself struggling, the agony of being unable to write will cleave open a fissure in life which I can then infiltrate. A new form, a new language, will be waiting there for me to grasp. And I do know now that this is neither optimism, or pride.

    About the translator

    Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist) is an early-career translator of Korean literature, with The Vegetarian by Han Kang forthcoming from Portobello Books. She has received translation grants from the International Communication Foundation, and LTI Korea (forTheEssayist’s Desk by Bae Suah). English PEN funded her sample translation of Hwang Sok-Yong’s Princess Bari. She is currently studying for a PhD in contemporary Korean literature at SOAS.

  • The suffering healers

    Ahead of his appearances with English PEN at the Free Word Centre and London Book Fair 2014, Hwang Sok-Yong takes us into the shamanistic past of Korean culture, and how those creation stories can be used to write about globalisation and modern suffering

    Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

    For many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, the structure and content of a shaman ritual, which helps the passage of the souls of the dead from this world to the next, has been passed down from generation to generation, retaining a remarkably similar form given the time span involved. This exorcism tradition, generically known as
    Hwangch’ŏn Muga (‘Shaman Songs of the Underworld’), includes 47 oral sub-stories 
    relating specifically to ‘Princess Bari’, a shaman narrative that has been recited across the Korean peninsula with very little local variation. Much like the Greek Myth of Odysseus and the Scandinavian tales of Odin, the plot is structured around a journey to the world of the dead, undertaken in order to rescue one of the souls there. Shamans, who are female in Korean culture, consider ‘Bari’ as their foundation myth, referring to ‘Grandma Bari’ as the original ancestor of all Korean shamans. They themselves are uncertain as to why the ‘Bari’ narrative came to be included in all exorcism rituals, but it seems that through recounting the sufferings and ordeals experienced by Bari, their progenitor, shamans have been able to claim for themselves her position as a ‘suffering healer of sufferings’, one who solves various ordeals while undergoing them herself.

    Together with my previous novels
    The Guest and
    Shim Chong,
    Princess Bari presents a reality which is recognisably that of our present world using a distinctively Korean form and narrative. If the period from the fall of the Berlin wall to the beginning of the Bush administration saw the beginnings of globalisation, 9/11 was the turning point after which a more openly enforced American unilateralism led to an increase in globalisation’s reach and intensity. Now, its effects can be clearly felt not only in Korea, but in every country, resulting in polarisation between nations.

    After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, North Korea suffered a famine which lasted for more than ten years, peaking as the period in the late 1990s known as the ‘Arduous March’. According to a UN survey, as many as three and a half million people may have died from starvation and the side effects of malnutrition between 1994 and 1998. Meanwhile in South Korea, only a very short distance away, we had everything in abundance. While recognising the responsibility of the North Korean government and seeking to call them to account, I also repeatedly criticised the hypocritical human rights logic of the Big Powers who instituted and subsequently managed the division of Korea into North and South, with other Communist countries previously supplying the former, and US troops still stationed in the latter. The reality of life in  North Korea has been obscured by ideological arguments and strategic preparations for the (highly unlikely) possibility of a ‘North Korean collapse’. Many aspects of the situation have been widely forgotten, or else used solely in propaganda intended to vilify the North Korean regime’s anti-humanitarianism. Every victim, every refugee in today’s world, must pass through the new ‘hell’ that has been brought about by the dark side of globalisation.

    For me, constructing a story overlaying the ‘movement through hell’ of present-day refugees with that of the Korean shaman myth ‘Princess Bari’ is a very symbolic act. Bari goes to the ends of the earth searching for the ‘water of life’, posing questions like: how, in this 21
    st
    century global village of dissolution, hatred and death, can we discover the road which leads to life? what is the real meaning of this ‘water of life’? How could a modern-day Bari go about finding such a thing? These questions were the seeds for
    Princess Bari. 

  • Capturing the mood

    In translating literature into English, tone and flow are everything. The right tone will capture the author’s intent and voice, magically transporting the reader into a different world created by the novelist. A not-quite-right tone makes the reading experience much like listening to a CD that keeps skipping— the reader will be pulled out of the story, unable to inhabit the fictional world the way she might if she were reading the original.

    As a translator from the Korean, I am constantly on guard against that reaction and therefore take very seriously the task of landing on the right tone. It can be challenging to capture, particularly when the author or narrator’s voice is so different from my own. To put myself in the right frame of mind, I read widely in English when I take on a new project. To translate a satirical, postmodern novel, I read several such English novels; when working on a novel about a poet and his poetry, I read various volumes of poetry. This ritual isn’t so much to gain direct inspiration, but rather to energize me, the way one might listen to upbeat music while jogging.

    I’ve translated many novels with alienated, lonely male characters, who often express their disillusion with life through destructive behavior I don’t relate to or talk in ways that feel foreign to me. In these cases, I pay particular attention to the way men of a certain age and epoch speak in movies, novels, and in life. Dialogue is revised and edited again, as I poll acquaintances, friends, and colleagues to craft an authentic voice. For example, in one project, a character is a middle-aged former baseball player, and to properly render the way he thinks about his past career and talks shop with a buddy, I read articles and blog posts about baseball to get a feel for the way people discuss the game, and asked baseball fanatics around me for their opinions on how they would talk about certain aspects of the sport. Little touches like these go unnoticed when done well, but are glaring when done poorly; they contribute greatly to the overall tone of the book.

    Using these methods, I have embodied the voice of a middle-aged North Korean spy, a guilt-ridden writer despairing at the loss of her mother, a 1940s Japanese prison guard, a coddled but neglected ten-year-old girl who feels like an outsider, a murderous sociopath, and an autistic math whiz.

    The most challenging, however, wasn’t any of these characters, but a hen named Sprout. In The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-mi Hwang, recently published in both the US and the UK, the feisty, spunky, independent-minded hen, yearning to leave the battery cage to lay and hatch an egg, charts her own course, refusing to settle for anything less than the life she has in mind for herself. The author’s writing is spare and charged with emotion, and I wanted to convey that while keeping the prose elegant.

    As I read classic and modern-day fables, I went through several versions of the manuscript, editing, discarding, and reworking to get to the right tone. In one of my early drafts, I had rendered a passage this way:

    Sprout slowed down to match the baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. ‘The weasel, that terrifying hunter! I’m scared. And I hate him. He took everything precious to me. I wish I were stronger than the weasel so I could get revenge!’ It was a foolish thought. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields was enough to make her cry. But she didn’t, closing her beak firmly.

    Although more literally translated, the hen’s thoughts in single quotes were jarring in English. Eventually, I decided to do away with the single quotes throughout the text while retaining Sprout’s feelings and thoughts. In the end, I ended up with the passage below:

    Sprout slowed down to match Baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. Sprout felt surging hatred toward the weasel. He’d taken every precious being. She wanted to be stronger than the weasel to get revenge. But she knew it was foolish. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields again was enough to make her cry. But she held her tears at bay and set her beak.

    In the second version, Sprout’s fear and gumption are still on display, but the text reads more fluidly, encapsulating the mood of the novel more effectively. As this novel is a fable, I wanted to convey the deeper meaning while keeping to the lean style of writing. It was surprising how difficult this proved to be, but it is because works with more complex sentence and narrative structures that seem more difficult at first glance allow for a wider choice of words. My goal for every translation I do is to recreate the mood of the original novel—in this one, to transport the English language reader into Sun-mi Hwang’s universe of brave, singular animals.

    • Sun-mi Hwang  is speaking at the Cambridge Literature Festival at 10am on Sunday April 6th, in the Lightfoot Room at the Divinity School,  St John’s College, St John’s Street, Cambridge, as well as at the English PEN Literary Salon, at the London Book Fair, Earls Court, at 11.30 on Weds April 9th, all as part of the British Council Cultural Programme.
    • Please see here to buy the book The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.
    • Please see here for an interview with Sun-Mi Hwang, author of The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.

  • 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) 

  • 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)