Writers in Translation

Each year, Writers in Translation support between 6 and 8 books that are translated from a wide variety of foreign languages. Our aim is to celebrate books of outstanding literary value, dedication to free speech and intercultural understanding.

In September 2008, the Writers in Translation Committee chose to support 3 books which will be published in the first half of 2009:

1) Ron Leshem: Beaufort, translated from Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg, Vintage, February 2009.

2) Tahar Ben Jelloun: Leaving Tangier, translated from French by Linda Coverdale, Arcadia Books, March 2009.

3) Ruth Maier: Ruth Maier's Diary: A Young Girl's Life under Nazism, edited by Jan Erik Vold, translated from Norwegian by Jamie Bulloch, Harvill Secker, March 2009.

The publication of these titles will be celebrated at dedicated events organized by the publishers and English PEN.

Writers in Translation is currently promoting

 

Evelio Rosero: The Armies, translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, MacLehose Press, November 2008

 

Ismael, a retired school teacher in a small Colombian village, gathers oranges, admires beautiful women and has, in the opening pages, an idyllic everyday life. Then the village is ransacked by an obscure militia and he is thrown into the fray and his mental stability collapses. The horrors which overwhelm the inhabitants of this village has become an everyday occurrence in Colombia. Villagers are kidnapped, killed, they disappear at the hands of unidentified groups - the armies of the title: guerillas, paramilitaries, drugs traffickers.

 

Peter Pisťanek: The Wooden Village (Rivers of Babylon 2) and The End of Freddy (Rivers of Babylon 3), translated from Slovak and Czech by Peter Petro, Garnett Press, November 2008

 

The Wooden Village is a dour version of life under unregulated capitalism, infiltrated by survivors from the communist secret police and underworld, as well as by new mafias from the east; it gives the lie to the official (and patriotic) view of Slovakia as a country that has easily found its ancestral moral and cultural roots.

 

The End of Freddy is set in both the Czech and Slovak republics, and branches out from being a novel about the dominance of pornography under gangster rule into a semi-fantastic political parable. It deals with the mutual prejudices and rivalries that bedevil Czechs and Slovaks, their self-aggrandising illusions against the background of a former Soviet Union disintegrating into chaos and civil wars.