I was so happy to be invited back to speak at the Gŵyl Haf literary festival this year. First organised by Caitlin Van Buren in 2020, Gŵyl is an online festival celebrating all aspects of literature in translation, and is a wonderful and positive space for conversations to take place (you can see last year’s Translating Women event here!)

I got to talk about the four books I’ve most enjoyed reading in the past year: from fantastical beasts to righteous wrath, a hilarious road trip to a heartbreaking family saga, find out my top picks for this strange year AND, as an added bonus, the two books that define the “comfort reading” habit I’ve developed during the repeated lockdowns!

In more general terms, you can hear me talk about how geopolitical bias affects what gets through to us in translation, and how barriers are multiplied for women, especially women who don’t belong to dominant groups in terms of age, class, race and other characteristics. We also talked about risk in publishing, and how to balance the need to publish more diversely with the need to remain financially viable. These are things I don’t talk about a great deal on the blog, but that I’m working on for the book I’m writing on gender and activism in the UK publishing industry, which I was also invited to talk about. So you can hear all about the amazing publishing houses I’m writing about and what I hope to achieve with my research.

I hope you’ll enjoy this talk as an alternative to my usual blog posts, and don’t forget to check out some of the other great sessions at Gŵyl!

Happy viewing, and thank you as always for reading along with me.