Posts featuring Posy Simmonds

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 9, 2026  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, China, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the cancellation of a controversial comics festival in France; the Arabic-language launch of an important literary account of Spanish colonization; and the awardees from one of China’s most prestigious prizes in children’s literature. Read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

The fifty-third annual Angoulême International Comics Festival—a renowned celebration of comics and graphic novels slated to take place January 29 – February 1, and which I have written about for Asymptote twice in the past—has been cancelled for 2026. Save for one cancellation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the first time in the festival’s history that it will not be taking place.

The festival’s organizers, a group called 9e Art+, announced the news in early December, asserting that this cancellation is due to lack of funding. However, authors and contributors—including Anouk Ricard, the winner of the festival’s grand prix last year—have been raising calls to boycott the festival for the past few months following multiple ignored sexual assault cases, un-transparent business practices, and commercial excess. Over four hundred authors called for a boycott in April of 2025, and multiple others have joined the call in the time since. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Ibrahim Fawzy, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, Egypt, and the Philippines!

This week, our team members take us to festivals around the world — from comics in France, to Filipino children’s literature in Italy, to Bedouin poetry in Egypt, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

A little over a year ago, I wrote a dispatch for this column about the 2024 Festival Internationale de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême, an annual celebration of the art of the graphic novel. Visual storytelling has always been a staple of French literature, going as far back as Renaissance-era illustrated manuscripts, but the modern art of the bande-dessinée (often referred to as the Ninth Art) is thought to have taken root in the early 19th century.

In countries like the US, graphic novels are often considered to be for children, which is a shame because they have the potential to add a fascinating element to storytelling. As someone who is incredibly passionate about the genre, I was thrilled to see the festival come back in full swing this past weekend for its 52nd year. As one of the largest comics festivals in the world, it hosted hundreds of thousands of participants and countless illustrators and authors for a weekend of workshops, exhibitions—including one on the work of last year’s Grand Prix winner, Posy Simmonds—and industry discussion. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 1, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, José García Escobar, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from Central America, France, and the United States!

This week, our team brings you literary news from around the world, including an experimental poetry reading and a festival celebrating comics! From cross-continental prize to a new exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, read on to find out more.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

On February 7, I watched as the internationally-renowned Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor, Rocío Cerón presented a spellbinding performance at New York University’s KJC Center. Through sound, voice, and moving images, the performance expands on Cerón’s 2022 book Divisible corpóreo, a poetry collection that thematizes the relationship between language, poetry, and the body.

While Cerón read from the book, the screen behind her projected images featuring her bedroom and herself. These visuals were not static. Rather, they transformed in rhythmic syncopation along with Cerón’s voice. In addition, Cerón not only read the book out loud. She also brought her poems to a further experiential dimension through several resources grounded in her voice: she raised and lowered her pitch and volume, repeated words and phrases with different speeds, and sometimes elongated vowels and stuttered consonants. The effect was dreamlike. I was immediately thrown into a trance, a characteristic effect of Cerón’s awe-inspiring transmedia readings.

After the audience’s applause, Cerón was interviewed by Irma Gallo, a student in NYU’s Spanish MFA program. During this Q&A, Cerón reflected on her creative process and approach to live readings, noting that her performances often include improvisation, which makes each one of them a unique, ephemeral experience. She also talked about the feminist elements in her poetry, such as references to lineages of women writers and reflections on the mitochondrial DNA, only transmissible from mother to child. To conclude, she specified that the book Divisible corpóreo is the second installment of a trilogy that explores the connection between poetry and different senses. The other two books are Spectio (2019) and Simultáneo sucesivo (2023). Paraphrasing Cerón’s own words, these collections explore the interrelation between what we can observe and what we can hear. Each text establishes an intertextual dialogue with the other two “creating,” in Cerón’s words, “a network of signifiers and symbolic fields that touch and traverse one another.” READ MORE…