What’s New with the Asymptote Team

The latest from Asymptote's own

For his collection of short stories, 37 Bridges, contributing editor Aamer Hussein won the KLF/Embassy of France prize for Best Fiction at the Karachi Literature Festival.

Contributing editor Adrian West’s translation of Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny (of which the first chapter appeared in Asymptote in January 2013) has just been published by David R. Godine. Read Adrian’s Q&A with Scott Esposito and his interview with Pere Gimferrer himself for World Literature Today.

For his translation of Viola Di Grado’s Hollow Heart, contributing editor Antony Shugaar was shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize.

Brazil editor-at-large Bruna Lubato wrote an essay about the literary significance of postcards for the Ploughshares blog and also contributed to a feature, “Reading the World,” for the book review supplement of China’s Economic Observer.

Drama Editor Caridad Svich had the world premiere of her play Agua de Luna (psalms for the rouge) at Matrix Theatre in Detroit under Sherrine Azab’s direction. Find out more here.

Contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac recently published two reviews: one of Miljenko Jergović’s The Walnut Mansion, and the other one of Julian Borger’s The Butcher’s Trail: The Secret History of the Balkan Manhunt for Europe’s Most-Wanted War Criminals.

Criticism editor Ellen Jones’s translation of an extract from Enrique Winter’s novel Bin Bags was published in Columbia Journal in addition to being featured as one of our own Translation Tuesday pieces in February, which, like all our Translation Tuesday pieces, was also simultaneously showcased in The Guardian. Her review of Lina Meruane’s Seeing Red (translated by Megan McDowell) was also recently featured in MAKE.

Senior Editor Florian Duijsens translated a personal essay about the refugee crisis by the Flemish writer Peter Vermeersch for the Slovenia literary Festival Fabula 2016 in Ljubljana, European City of Literature.

Assistant editor K. T. Billey recently read translations for The Catapult‘s Translation/Poetry Edition, with Gregory Pardlo and Anna Rosenwong.

Editor-in-Chief Lee Yew Leong was selected as one of the judges for PEN International’s 2016 New Voices Award, alongside fellow jury members Mircea Cărtărescu, Laia Jufresa, Andrei Kurkov, John Ralston Saul, and Annelies Verbeke. Nominations for the award are open till May 27.

A poetry computational paper by MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu), Romania & Moldova editor-at-large, co-authored with his student Bryan Paget and Computer Science Prof Diana Inkpen (at uOttawa) was accepted to the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society’s Conference to be held in Key Largo, FL, in May 2016.  The paper is titled “Poetry Classification by Meter and Rhyme as Part of the Graph Poem Project.” MARGENTO also recently published a translation of Simona Popescu’s poem, ” Ephebe with Cypripedium,” over at Plume.

Over at the Ploughshares blog, Israel editor-at-large Yardenne Greenspan meditated on the necessity of literary translation.

Interested in joining our team? Check out our first recruitment call of the year here. (Deadline: 15 Mar, 2016)