Posts featuring Zadie Smith

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. In Singapore, the Singapore Writers’ Festival hosted international writers, such as Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds, whilst the Cordite Poetry Review published a special feature on Singapore poetry; in Taiwan, Kishu An Forest of Literature centre has held a discussion about a new translation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and in the UK, Carcanet Press has launched Eavan Boland’s final collection, The Historians, whilst new books about renowned poets Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton have been released. Read on to find out more! 

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore:

The beginning of November sees a deluge of new writing coming from a host of literary journals. Joshua Ip and Alvin Pang have guest edited a special feature on Singapore poetry in Cordite Poetry Review that gives us the rare pleasure of rethinking Singapore poetry through the art of transcreation. The editors commissioned thirty young poets (who write primarily in English) for the challenge of transcreating verse, not just from the official languages of Malay, Tamil, and Chinese, but also ‘minor’ languages such as Kristang, Bengali, and Tagalog that make up Singapore’s linguistic soundscape. Additionally, Mahogany Journal, a new online periodical on the scene for anglophone South Asian writers in Singapore, has just released their second issue, which is themed ‘Retellings.’ Finally, one of our longest-running online journals, the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, has launched its October issue. Lovers of Singapore literature have a huge array of choice.

Meanwhile, this year’s virtual Singapore Writers’ Festival (mentioned in my October dispatch) concluded last weekend. While festivalgoers did not experience the familiar ritual of queuing and squeezing into a room packed with fellow writers and readers, the online format delivered its own peculiarities. Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds were some of the international stars joining us from different time zones across our devices. Margaret Atwood, whose message to novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal was a hopeful “we will get through,” had many viewers sending questions through a live chat box asking the author of The Handmaid’s Tale what it means to write in these dystopian times. Instead of browsing the festival bookstore in between panels, I scrolled through the webstore run by Closetful of Books. Nifty videos were added to lure me to new book releases, booksellers curated a list of recommended reads, while readers craving connection left love notes to nobody in particular. The copy of Intimations I ordered arrived with a sweet touch: it came with a bookplate signed by Zadie Smith. With access to video on demand, rather than rushing from room to room, I found myself toggling between panels on Southeast Asian historical fiction and Korean horror without so much as lifting a finger. If I find myself unable to concentrate (as Zadie Smith said of our social media age: “I feel very bullied at the speed I am told to think daily”), I tune in to Poetry Bites to hear Marc Nair engage in ten-minute intimate chats with ten poets. Kudos to festival director Pooja Nansi and her team for this massively successful event. We are all already looking forward to what the next year’s edition of the festival brings. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's latest literary news from Poland, Sweden, and China!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Poland, Sweden, and China. In Poland, Anna Zaranko’s translation of Kornel Filipowicz was awarded the 2020 Found in Translation Award; in Sweden, an anthology will soon be released of writings on coronavirus, featuring many international writers including Olga Tokarczuk; and in China, bookshops are responding to challenging times by moving to online engagement with their reading community. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

Since she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, Wisława Szymborska’s poetry has been appreciated around the world, while the work of her partner of twenty-three years, the master story teller Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990) remained largely unknown outside Poland. Fortunately, this has changed with The Memoir of an Anti-hero by Kornel Filipowicz, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2019 in a translation by Anna Zaranko. On March 31, Zaranko received the 2020 Found in Translation Award in recognition of her “quietly understated yet immensely evocative rendering of Filipowicz’s prose, which The Sunday Times’s David Mills described as ‘provocative, troubling, awkward, a proper classic.’”

On May 27, the winner of the eleventh Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage, awarded by the City of Warsaw, was announced online (the fourteen-minute video of the ceremony has English subtitles). The prize went to Katarzyna Kobylarczyk for Strup. Hiszpania rozdrapuje rany (The Scab. Spain Scratches its Wounds, 2019 Wydawnictwo Czarne), a book about grappling with historical memory. The jury praised it as “a fascinating story that blends the nightmarish and the grotesque, in which reality reveals its metaphorical dimension. It is proof that one can create real literature relying solely on facts.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Print houses and jury panels are busy, autumn is coming.

Fall’s footsteps can already be heard in literary circles. As summer hosts its last open-air festivals, prize organizers and publishers are gearing up for a new season of surprises. In today’s dispatch, our Editors-At-Large from Europe tell us more about what is going on in the Czech Republic, Portugal, and France in this transitionary period. Come back next week for this summer’s last dispatch. 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Czech Republic:

Held from 1 July to 4 August at venues in five cities – Brno, Ostrava, Wrocław, Košice and Lviv – across four countries, Authors‘ Reading Month (ARM) may well be Europe’s biggest literary festival. It is certainly a major logistical feat: now in its 19th year, the festival featured 100 authors from six countries. Turkey alone, this year’s guest country, was represented by more than thirty authors, including Nedim Gürsel,  Murathan Mungan, Ayfer Tunç and Çiler İlhan. A strong Czech contingent featured prize-winning novelists Bianca Bellová and Josef Pánek, bestselling writers Michal Viewegh and Alena Mornštajnová, as well as a plethora of poets.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

This week we report from Mexico, Guatemala, and the UK.

We’re still elated over the launch of our Spring 2018 issue, but that doesn’t mean the work of compiling literary news ever stops. Our weekly roundup brings us to Mexico, Guatemala, and the United Kingdom.

Paul Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors at Large, reporting from Mexico

April has been an exciting month for the Tsotsil Maya poetry collective Snichimal Vayuchil. First, on April 12 the collective participated in a transnational indigenous poetry reading with Kimberly L. Becker, a poet of mixed Cherokee, Celtic, and Teutonic descent. Poems were read in English, Spanish, and Tsotsil, with collective coordinator Xun Betán translating several of Becker’s works into Tsotsil. The event was sponsored by Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, United States, and Abuelita Books in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Updates from Spain, Morocco, and the United States, from the Asymptote team

This week, we visit Morocco with new Editor-at-Large Jessie Stoolman, who tells us about a new play based on a classic novel. Then in Spain, we have a publishing update with Editor-at-Large Carmen Morawski, and onto the United States, we strap in for today’s Presidential Inauguration and writers’ reactions to the historic event. 

Editor-at-Large Jessie Stoolman reports from Morocco:

A theatrical interpretation of Mohammed Khair Ed-dine’s novel Le Déterreur [نباش القبور], adapted by Cédric Gourmelon and starring Ghassan El-Hakim, is currently on tour in Morocco, with the next performance set to take place on January 21 at the House of Culture [دار الثقابة] in Tetouan.  In the novel, a man from southern Morocco shares his countercurrent perspectives on living in a marginalized community inside a wider, fractured, postcolonial space as he recounts his life story.

Winner of numerous literary awards, including Jean Cocteau’s Les infants terribles literary prize for his novel Agadir, Khair Ed-dine (or “The Blue Bird,” as he is sometimes called) mainly wrote poetry and novels in French. He is credited with establishing a new style of writing, what he coined guérilla linguistique, that resists, in both form and content, linguistic or societal domination. Considering his prolific contributions to the genre of revolutionary writing, it is unsurprising that Khair Ed-dine is commonly grouped among renowned, twentieth century North African authors writing in French, such as Assia Djebar, Yacine Kateb, Abdellatif Laabi, Driss Chraibi, and Tahar Ben Jelloun.

Some of Khair Ed-dine’s work has been translated into German and English. For more about the German translation of his posthumously published novel Once Upon a Time There Was a Happy Couple (Es war einmal ein glückliches Paar), Qantara.de published this article, which includes a summary of the book with excerpts and information about the writer.  Similarly, to read a sample of Khair-Eddine’s poetry translated into English, see this piece from Jadaliyya, that includes four poems from his collection Ce Maroc!

In other literary news, only a few more weeks until Morocco’s largest book fair will be back!  The 23rd edition of the International Book Fair in Casablanca will open on February 9.

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