I was confused and excited at the same time. My colleague told me the first person I should call in Lampedusa was Pietro Bartolo, the doctor at the local clinic.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘What kind of help can he give me? I want to tell the story of the people who leave their country to survive. Why a doctor?’

‘Pietro isn’t a doctor,’ he answered. ‘He’s the doctor and he’s the first person the refugees meet when they reach Lampedusa. You have to talk to him.’

So when the plane landed at the island’s airport I called Pietro Bartolo. He looked very unassuming, but came across as calm and determined. He was my first contact on the island, and each time I went to Lampedusa he gave me precious advice. He liked my way of writing about what was happening and I liked the way he welcomed people as they arrived frightened after a terrible journey. So we became friends.

In 2014, a year after the horrific shipwreck in which 368 men, women and children died, I went to Pietro’s clinic to see a photography exhibition about that disaster. Back in 2013, on 3 October, a delegation of local healthcare professionals was in Lampedusa for a conference. When the news of the shipwreck arrived, Nino Randazzo, the bureau spokesman, went with Pietro and other doctors to the quay of the famous Favaloro pier. He started taking pictures and videos which became the first documentary evidence of the tragedy. I asked Pietro to tell me what happened that day and to describe the photos. Whilst Pietro spoke, my colleague Marco Sacchi and I cried. His voice was full of emotion and he conveyed to us the great pain he had felt as lifeless bodies began to fill up the pier. Only one picture made him proud: Pietro and a fisherman carrying a girl who seemed to have drowned. Her name was Kebrat and she was the only one Pietro could save. A miracle.

That interview was shown on Mediterraneo, a Rai national magazine show. At the end of the interview I told Pietro: ‘We have to write a book, we have to tell people what is really happening and we have to help these people who only ask to leave in safety and to save their families.’ At first, Pietro didn’t want to write this book because he feared that telling their stories was betraying their trust. But when Fuocoammare, Gianfranco Rosi’s film, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival I called Pietro to congratulate him and he told me: ‘Now we can do the book.’

So we started this incredible journey. We decided to arrange the stories in a way that put everyone on the same level. It was an exhausting experience; when Pietro told me the stories he relived every moment, and when I had finished writing I felt destroyed. When the book was finished I went to Lampedusa. Pietro, his wife Rita, and I shut ourselves away for two days. Every page was a punch to the stomach and by the time we had finished we had no more tears to cry.

But writing the book was just the first step. Our mission is to speak to people. We’ve visited schools all around Europe, theatres, town squares, universities, and each time people tell us: ‘We didn’t think it was so bad.’ We want to keep on discussing this, debating it, and telling everyone that we have to face reality, that we have to help these people, that we have to realise that there’s no alternative. We must welcome those who run away from hunger and war. Lampedusa’s people did it and sent a message to Europe. And Europe has to hear this message.

The post Lampedusa: Gateway to Europe appeared first on English PEN.

The end of the Cold War has not liberated us from dualism. Nowadays, the situation may be much more confusing, but the principle remains unchanged: many cultural pressure groups (as we might call them) try to impose their view by any means possible. And in the end they all want the same thing: more power and more resources. The novelty lies in the fact that we cannot maintain the illusion of an anyway contradictory, protected open space, where artists would enjoy greater freedom, like in the old West. Today, everything is everywhere: nationalists, Islamists, sexists, underprivileged minorities, poverty, refugees, war. We live in an epoch of extreme interconnectivity. Again, we have to choose sides. So: are we to regard this panorama as a range of possibilities or do we live in the midst of innumerable threats?

As a writer I see the possibilities, because times of change offer a wealth of inspiration, especially the worst aspects of this change. But I am a family man with children, and like many other people I am afraid. As everything has potential repercussions for my personal life, I need to be careful, even when writing. Since the fatwa was issued on Salman Rushdie, and more recently, since the assassination of the Charlie Hebdo caricaturists in Paris, the gap has virtually closed between two very important concepts, which ought to remain distinct if artistic freedom is to be preserved: on one hand there is the artist and their work of art, and on the other there is the perpetrator and their crime. While the narrator was part of the fiction, the author could make them say whatever they wanted, without risking consequences to themselves. But today the position of the narrator has all but collapsed; their voice is in the process of becoming identical with that of the author.

This shift is not new, indeed it started way back in the sixties and seventies when thinkers and writers such as Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco reflected upon apocalyptic speech to show how the author deliberately vanishes in the name of an absolute truth. An author can only have an interest in vanishing, however, if otherwise they are likely to be found guilty. The proud or even decadently boastful author is the one who knows that the rules of the game still apply, which protect them in real life. In the past, when violence was the monopoly of governments, fame could even be a means of protection.

This is no longer the case. The rules of the game have changed and we do not know which ones will be applied next time, nor who is going to apply them, nor when or where this might take place. The decentralisation and privatisation of politically or religiously motivated violence has led to arbitrary, anonymous and merciless censorship. Hence the general concern, especially for people who need the public, such as artists.

Art itself is changing as a result of this evolution. Two reactions may be observed, whether in literature, in film or on stage: either the authors attempt to claim a factual truth for their story, or they renounce any form of commitment and simply entertain. There is nothing wrong with either, but the flood of true stories we experience these days, together with the other flood of ‒ to express it in binary terms ‒ ‘untrue’ stories (such as fantasy, mystery, horror, action thrillers, filmed comics, etc.), make me suspect that many authors are imposing some kind of self-censorship. We are seeking shelter, and the factual truth is as much a shelter as is any kind of parallel universe, if only the universe of complete privacy.

The problem with the factual truth is that it is binary: verifiable or falsifiable. This truth does not belong to art itself, it belongs to public discourse. It seems that, in order to produce meaningful art, many authors feel their story should be based on something ‘real’, on facts. At the same time this connection protects them, because nobody can be blamed for reality – it simply exists. Ergo, I’m not guilty. Don’t kill the messenger! The author disappears as a source; their story becomes apocalyptic in the sense that it reveals truth.

The importance of the factual truth has increased dramatically in storytelling. It dominates many stories, whereas their own truth as a work of art diminishes: a factual truth can best be told in the most conventional way, that is the safest method. It is dangerous to be creative; creativity may trigger dangerous misunderstandings.

When what is being said assumes more importance than how it is being said, i.e. when these two aspects fall apart instead of forming an artistic whole ‒ be it in the production, or in the reception, or both ‒ then we have a crisis of storytelling. And a crisis of storytelling is symptomatic of a profound cultural crisis.

We’re talking about taboos. Taboos in speech want to impose blind spots on the perception of reality and vice versa. Perhaps this is a normal reaction to an overwhelmingly chaotic era: the attempt to reduce perception in order to preserve stability. Maybe the global emergence of fundamentalist movements is a logical, albeit paradoxical, consequence of a disorienting complexity. And maybe an author who dares to increase disorientation with their storytelling risks being punished as a perpetrator in an almost epistemological sense. But how should we react to this reaction?

Steven Uhly was born in 1964 in Cologne and is of German-Bengali descent, and partially rooted in Spanish culture. He has studied literature, served as the head of an institute in Brazil, and translated poetry and prose from Spanish, Portuguese, and English. His book Adams Fuge was granted the Tukan-Preis of the city of Munich in 2011. His novel Glückskind (2012) was filmed as a primetime production by director Michael Verhoeven for German television. He lives in Munich with his family.

Kingdom of Twilight (Maclehose Press, 2017): a ground-breaking, thrilling historical saga that follows the quest for identity and home in a traumatised post-war world. Find out more about this PEN award-winning novel and pre-order it.

The post Is there a crisis in storytelling? appeared first on English PEN.

You have chosen America as the location of your novel. The sense of landscape and place is very powerful and very different from Switzerland. Why America for a Genevois? And why the small town of Aurora?

I love the area of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. I’ve been going there every summer for 25 years.  I know the area like home. I particularly spent lots time in the town of Stonington, Maine. I also like the town of Bar Harbor – in my book, I modelled the town of Somerset on the layout of Bar Harbor.

My cousins, who live in Washington DC, have a house in Stonington. So I didn’t really choose to go to that town, it just came naturally because of my childhood. How many times I’ve crossed New England, specifically Massachusetts and New Hampshire, to get to Stonington! So I put those places in my book in order to share them with my readers in Europe. To show them which regions and settings live within me.

Your book is written from the perspective of an American writer.  Is American literature important to you? Who do you admire there?

I admire John Steinbeck since Of Mice and Men is the first book that bowled me over. I am also a fan of Philip Roth. He is probably the greatest contemporary writer. Reading his work, you retrace the story of America over the last 50 years.

Are you anxious about how the US audience will receive your novel?

I hope that my American readers will feel at home, and will grant me the privilege of being accepted as an author who writes about America, without being American myself.

Your novel is a true and seamless mixture of genres:  crime, roman noir, psychological drama. What did you set out to write?

I set out to write a story about a small town. What happens to Nola is obviously terrible, but it’s a ‘banal’ crime.  How many children disappear in the world every day? I didn’t want to tell a story about a crime but a story about banality, in its most sordid aspects. Although there is indeed an investigation in the book, I don’t think of it as crime fiction. If you take out the investigation, there is still a story.

Nothing is the way it seems in your novel, and you are a master plotter. The reader is forever surprised and newly convinced by clever twists and turns of the plot. Did you know all along who committed the crime, or did you surprise yourself?

I did not have a plan before I started writing the book. The pleasure for me was simply to invent the story as I went along, and to see how the events unfolded.

Your characters remain morally ambivalent which is fascinating for readers and also makes them want to continue reading until the end of the 700 or more pages.  Would you be able to tell us why you chose this approach to your characters?

I wanted to write a story that people would read like they watch their favourite TV series: voraciously, always wanting to know what happens next. I was passionate about my characters, and I hope that shows in the book. The writer has to be the first one to be passionate about the story, otherwise how else can he expect readers to be passionate about it?

Your novel discusses the concept of celebrity, fame and infamy. And it satirises the publishing industry to a certain extent. Do you see modern celebrities as victims or winners?

It’s not so much that the book talks about the concept of celebrity as about the perception of celebrity by people of my generation. It’s as if achieving celebrity status is a sign of social success, when in fact, achieving celebrity status is social endangerment. I think that’s the main question of my book. He who becomes a celebrity loses a part of himself. Whether he likes it or not, he becomes obligated to share a bit of himself with those who know him and recognise him.

Your novel has won many literary prizes and has enjoyed great international success. Why do you write? Has this success changed how you see your role?

For me, the best part of this experience is when I receive messages from my readers, especially young readers, who tell me they weren’t big readers, but that my book has got them started and now they want to read more books. I think it’s very important to encourage young people to read.

Are there any other young Swiss writers you would like to recommend to British readers and publishers? Or French writers?

My favourite French writers are Romain Gary and Marguerite Duras.  Gary’s work and his stories touch me more than anyone else’s. Marguerite Duras because I like her style. You get the impression that there’s not one word too many, that her sentences are perfect constructions, as if each word were a brick and if you took one out the whole work would fall apart.

About the editor

Tasja Dorkofikis is  editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books. Tasja divides her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A: Joël Dicker, author of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair appeared first on English PEN.

But after the initial impulse – what is the reality for publishers of translated fiction? There is a general feeling in the UK and US that more people are publishing literature in translation and that there is a growing acceptance of it. Is everything sorted now, then? Well, not quite. Our third birthday seems a good moment to talk about the publishing of literature in translation, focusing particularly on our case as it is what I’m qualified to talk about.

A number of publishers have been doing great translated books for decades, but it is also a good sign that new presses are springing up, including Peirene Press, Stork Press, Clerkenwell Press, MacLehose Press and ourselves, all in the last six years.Each press that publishes in translation is different, publishing different proportions of translated literature and different kinds of books. Some publish translations occasionally, such as Old Street Publishing’s recent Operation Massacre by Rodolfo Walsh; Harvill Secker does roughly 50% of its list in translation; our list is currently roughly 70% translated, while Peirene Press and Stork Press publish only translated works. Some focus more on crime and popular fiction and some more on literary authors whose writing might take many readers out of their comfort zones. Some find room for both.

My sense at the start was that there was no lack of publishing houses bringing out crime in translation (and publishers who could tell their Stieg Larsson copycats from the genuinely interesting French, German, Cuban and Japanese crime writers). What I felt we lacked in the English-speaking world were enough publishers of extraordinary, surprising writing.

I knew that to publish the kind of fresh, often foreign, mind-blowing fiction that I and many other people often thought was missing in the English-speaking world, the only sensible option, financially, might be not to have a normal commercial set-up. If the publishing house was not going to tailor its offering to Richard & Judy’s taste, we should plan to do without extra overheads (such as an office) and appeal to like-minded readers for their support.

And Other Stories registered as a Community Interest Company or CIC in 2010. It was limited by guarantee, but with not-for-private-profit characteristics.  A social enterprise, in other words. This makes clear at a fundamental level that our aims are different to investor- or shareholder-driven publishing companies where all decisions are ultimately about increasing profits and keeping the investors happy. Of course, in order to be able to continue our work in the long-term, we can’t lose money. The ‘community interest’ mission in our case means publishing works of literary value, re-investing profits in the company in order to pay translators well, and developing and mentoring new talent in the publishing industry, including debut writers and emerging editors and translators. (For at least half of our foreign-language authors we have commissioned great translators’ first book-length translations, giving them a foot in the door.)

The not-for-private-profit nature of the company has meant it has been (somewhat!) easier to apply for and receive funding support. In our current credit-crunched decade of austerity in the UK, the Arts Council’s funds have been cut repeatedly by the government. Established organisations find they are no longer regularly funded and must apply to the same National Lottery-funded Grants for the Arts pot that we are applying to. The competition is intense. We received two Grants for the Arts in 2010-2011 and 2012. This year we were recommended for funding by the Arts Council’s application assessor who applauded our work, but in the end the funding did not stretch to cover our project. Of course, we have sent another application in to the Arts Council already. And we are looking to follow the American arts model and appeal for philanthropy and private donors, as well as continuing to apply to other institutes to fund at least some of the translation costs. Thanks to English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme, the translation of Villalobos’ second book Quesadillas was funded and we were able to bring the author to England for a brilliant week of events in Norwich, Bath and London that culminated in a performance to an audience of over 200 people at Rich Mix, East London, that almost had a cow on stage. (Almost!)Not only is funding uncertain these days; sales are too. In 2012, during the crisis that almost led to Waterstones’ demise, orders dried up for publishers. Something similar could happen again. Moreover, fiction at the literary, surprising end of the spectrum does not tend to sell well unless the author has been shortlisted for major prizes or is a public figure. Maybe because it takes a few years for people to work out what the surprising author is doing. We were over the moon that our English author Deborah Levy was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Swimming Home. However, translated works are not eligible for the Man Booker, which does not help sales prospects for most of our brilliant literary authors. (When Down the Rabbit Hole became the first translation to be on the Guardian First Book Award shortlist it helped immensely. It has sold 8,000 copies so far.)

With funding and sales uncertain, an area of support that has been invaluable to us from the start is subscriptions. We now have around 700 people subscribing in advance to each of our books. I had seen some American publishers like Open Letter Books and Ugly Duckling Presse offer subscriptions of their books and remembered subscribers’ names at the back of some very, very old library books and it seemed like something we could do and link to a community of readers, writers and translators. To show our genuine gratitude for their up-front support, we thank subscribers by name in the back of the books; send them their books in advance of the retail publication date; invite them to special social and literary events for subscribers; give them free tickets to public events (such as Villalobos’ Rich Mix event) and extra goodies now and then (for example, postcards designed by our authors). It is a club of like-minded people whose broad support allows us to take creative risks and not be reliant on investors’ agendas.

Necessity breeds invention and we feel we are part of a wave of innovative publishers of literary translations, including Peirene Press and Berlin-based Frisch & Co who choose to publish fiction that is neither easily definable nor an easy sell: Peirene’s first book in 2010 was Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea – about a struggling mother killing her two children. It was not an immediate bestseller, but it is becoming a real favourite with discerning readers. Frisch & Co’s first books are just out this year and contain real gems: including Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun which I am keen to read, having already heard great things about it from our Argentine author Iosi Havilio and some knowledgeable Buenos Aires booksellers. Peirene Press pioneered direct-to-reader approaches such as pop-up shops and literary salons; we started translators’ reading groups to find great books and set up a subscription model in addition to retail sales; Frisch & Co have looked to make books economically possible by partnering with translators and foreign publishers and only publishing them as ebooks.

It is no exaggeration to say that for us, with our kind of new literary fiction, mainly in translation, our subscribers keep us going. They trust us to find new writers for them. The next deadline for new subscribers is our third birthday: 5th October 2013, for anyone who wants to help us publish the Albanian writer Elvira Dones’ novel Sworn Virgin. And that is something we will be celebrating.

About the author
Stefan Tobler is the publisher at And Other Stories, a young publishing house whose acclaimed books include Swimming Home and Black Vodka by Deborah Levy and Down the Rabbit Hole and Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos. Stefan Tobler is also a literary translator from Portuguese and German.

The post Three Years Old: the reality of publishing translated fiction appeared first on English PEN.