Translated from Spanish (Mexico) by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020) Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is a torrential vision of people on the margins of society, and a rage against a world that abandons them there. The narrative opens with a rotting corpse… Continue Reading
Women in Translation month is in full swing, and following on from the individual book recommendations I gave in an earlier post, today I want to focus on authors. I love it when publishing houses champion an author rather than… Continue Reading
Tonight the winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize will be announced, and it’s something of a landmark year for women in translation. I want to talk about how 2018’s Year of Publishing Women, though it seemed to have… Continue Reading
Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019 In this short, stark book, Annie Ernaux reconstructs her experience of a clandestine abortion in 1963, supplementing her memory of events with fragments of a journal she kept at the… Continue Reading
End-of-year compilations are abundant at the moment, and after an exciting year – generally, with the Year of Publishing Women, and personally, with the development of this blog – I want to round off the year with my top picks… Continue Reading
Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (Fitzcarraldo, 2018) The opening line of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, “All the images will disappear”, both sets up and sums up her project: every memory of every life – from historical atrocity… Continue Reading
Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo, 2017) In honour of last night’s Man Booker International prize announcement, I’m publishing a special mid-week review post on the winning book, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. Though Tokarczuk is not yet as well-known… Continue Reading