This week we bring you news from Sweden and Hong Kong, as well as news from our brand new Editor-at-Large, Alan Mendoza Sosa, in Mexico! In Sweden, Eva Wissting provides an update on the nominees for the prestigious August Prize; in Mexico, Alan Mendoza Sosa gives us an insight into the 41st edition of Oaxaca’s International Book Fair; and in Hong Kong, Charlie Ng takes us through the Poetics of Home Festival and an important new database including works of Hong Kong literature. Read on to find out more!
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
Autumn is the season of literary awards in Sweden! Last week, the nominees of the August Prize, the most prestigious literary award of Swedish literature, were announced. There are six nominees each in three categories: fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Named after the internationally acclaimed modernist playwright August Strindberg, the award was established in 1989 by the Swedish Publishers’ Association. In the fiction category, the nominees include, among other titles, Elin Cullhed’s Euforia—a fictionalized depiction of Sylvia Plath during her final year, which Canongate plans to publish in 2023 in English translation by Jennifer Hayashida. Also nominated is Maxim Grigoriev’s Europa—a novel about an immigrant experience of exile, which has already won the EU Prize for Literature. Grigoriev is also a literary translator from Russian into Swedish and has translated works by Nick Perumov, Olga Slavnikova, and Venedikt Yerofeyev. The nonfiction category includes literary scholar and translator Anders Cullhed’s Dante—an illustrated biography, published in time for the 700th anniversary of the passing of the Italian author—and publisher and literary translator Nils Håkanson’s Dolda gudar (Hidden Gods)—a book about literary translation that emphasizes the central role of the translator. The winners will be announced on November 22 at a live broadcast gala.
Another literary award in the Nordic region is the Nordic Council Literature Prize. This year, fourteen books from Denmark, Finland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, the Sami language area, Sweden, and Åland have been nominated, with the winners due to be announced on November 2. The two Swedish nominees are Johanne Lykke Holm for the novel Strega, and Andrzej Tichý for the short story collection Renheten (Purity). Lykke Holm is a writer, creative writing teacher, and literary translator from Danish to Swedish, who has translated Josefine Klougart and Yahya Hassan. Tichý has published several novels, short stories, nonfiction, and criticism, as well as being nominated for the August Prize in 2016. Last year’s Summer issue of Asymptote includes a review of Tichý’s novel Wretchedness from 2020 in English translation by Nichola Smalley.
Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico
Between October 15-24 the 41st edition of Oaxaca’s International Book Fair took place, in Oaxaca, a state in the south of Mexico that is synonymous with culture, history, and social activism. The lively attendance by both writers and readers reflected a rekindled enthusiasm among members of the literary community after lockdown.
The festival opened with the conferral of the prestigious Aura Estrada International Book Prize, awarded each year to an outstanding young female writer living in the United States, Canada, or Mexico, regardless of their nationality. This year, the winner was the Peruvian author and journalist Natalia Sánchez Loayza. Her text, Sopa de perro—still awaiting translation—will be published in the Spanish edition of Granta Magazine. The accolade’s award ceremony is traditionally followed by a lecture from a prominent contemporary writer. In the past, it has featured a number of Asymptote contributors, such as Colm Tóibín, Valeria Luiselli, Leila Guerriero, and Alejandro Zambra. Rachel Kushner and Kim Gordon gave the lecture this year.
There were also several panels, covering topics from abortion rights to climate change. Gabriela Wiener—whose book Sexographies was reviewed by Sarah Booker for Asymptote—participated in a round table with emerging contemporary writers Yolanda Segura, Andrea Bel Arruti, and Clyo Mendoza. They discussed the topic of love and its relationship to our contemporary context of heightened social, political, and environmental crises.
Another distinctive panel featured reflections about decolonialism. It was presided by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, an indigenous linguist, writer, and cultural critic from the Ayuujk Nation in Mexico, whose work has been published in international platforms such as The Baffler, TLS, and Rising Voices. Her talk centred on the complexities of recent global attempts to decolonize public spaces by taking down statues and monuments celebrating colonialist figures. In a different event, Gil also led a discussion about film and its relationship to the global climate crisis.
Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
The “HKKH: Sinophone Hong Kong literature: translation anthologies” is a new database at the Hong Kong Baptist University that collects and records data of anthologies in English and French that include Hong Kong literary works. The project aims to explore how the image of Hong Kong and Hong Kong literature are represented in the anthologies. It is the outcome of the funded project “Hong Kong and its Literature through a Double Lens: English and French Anthologies of Translated Literature”, led by translation scholar Maialen Marin-Lacarta of Hong Kong Baptist University. Writers, translators, and editors of Hong Kong literature have also been invited to participate in a series of interviews to talk about their experience with Hong Kong literature.
With support of the Lottery Fund from Arts Council England, the Institute of English Studies recently collaborated with Wasafiri to organise the “Poetics of Home Festival”-a digital festival that explored Chinese diaspora poetry. During the event, Jennifer Wong reported on Hong Kong poets’ involvement in her article “A Hong Kong poet’s sense of place”. Hong Kong poets were also invited to discuss topics such as their creative experience in relation to Hong Kong as a cosmopolitan city, Hong Kong’s local history and culture, and the roles English plays in different aspects of life, including real and imagined.
Renowned sinologist John Minford was the general editor of the recent Hong Kong literature translation project, the Hong Kong Literature Series, published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2020. The series includes the representative works of important Hong Kong writers such as Liu Yichang, Leung Ping-kwan, and Xi Xi. In his review of the series, Douglas Kerr comments that Minford’s choices in the series are “judicious, generous, and quite cunning”. The variety of genres, and the long time period covered, reflect the ambition of the project. The series presents the vicissitude of Hong Kong literature and how it has always been a witness of history.
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