The cold weather is usually pretty conducive to reading and exploring the world through stories and I very much hope that some of you have been inspired by recent dispatches to seek out the books we’ve covered.  Since the beginning of 2013 we have visited many places; from China and India to the Netherlands and Poland, and we will continue broadening our literary horizons. We looked at many genres too; from poetry to graphic novels and memoirs.

First to our selected PEN writers – each year English PEN’s Writers in Translation Committee select around 12 newly translated and published novels through their PEN Promotes programme. This January we had Nihad Sirees, the Syrian author of The Silence and the Roar, writing about Aleppo, his childhood town and literary inspiration. Gregor Benton looked at revolution, resistance and the Beijing University literature class that nurtured three of China’s best-known intellectual and political adversaries, in the light of his forthcoming translation of Mei Zhi’s prison memoirs F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years. Alejandro Zambra, the author of Ways of Going Home, talked to the PEN Atlas about his new novel, the responsibility of memory, and contemporary Chileans grappling with their country’s violent past.

Our other dispatches looked at similar themes of history and its effects on the present. Jeet Thayil reported from the Jaipur Literary Festival about the unusual experience of attending the festival under police guard, because the previous year he had read from The Satanic Verses. During his stay in Jaipur he was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his novel Narcopolis, which is also short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize (to be announced on the 14th of March).

Basia Howard, the translator of Mother Departs  by Tadeus Różewicz, published in March in the UK, wrote about Tadeusz Różewicz who is seen alongside Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłoszas one of the greats of Polish poetry. According to Seamus Heaney he is one of the great European poets of the twentieth century and Tom Paulin remarks that ‘Tadeusz Różewicz (…) sends messages from underground that are like jammed radio signals. Though he would not agree, he has succeeded in writing poetry after Auschwitz.’

Michele Hutchinson, one of our regular contributors, looked at international graphic novels and their new popularity, and travelled with Dutch writers all over the UK during their High Impact tour. High Impact is a brilliant new initiative, bringing new foreign writers to British readers.  The Greeks will be following the Dutch touring the UK later this year.

The PEN Atlas also compiled a selected list of books coming out in the UK in translation during 2013. It is an incredibly rich and stimulating list which includes crime, graphic novels, romance, memoir, poetry and many others….Despite the fact that the numbers of translated books published in the UK are still rather low, there are marvellous books there and we have a lot to celebrate.

The growing profile of books in translation is partly due to various translation initiatives, many worth exploring; from a wonderful selection of events at London Review of Books Bookshop, to translation summer schools in Norwich and London, a translation mentorship scheme, and a host of international writers attending UK literary festivals. And if you happen to be in New York, there is always the PEN World Voices Festival, which has just announced its line-up.

The PEN Atlas will travel extensively through Turkey during the next few months, and will bring you some new voices from Africa.  I hope that you will continue reading the PEN Atlas and the books we cover.  Read it, like it, and then share it!

Tasja Dorkofikis,

Editor, PEN Atlas

Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

The post PEN Atlas – Editor’s Round Up February 2013 appeared first on English PEN.

The entrance to the Aleppo Citadel has been shelled, and part of its wall was damaged. This 1,000 year old citadel sits on top of a hill in the middle of the city which grew and extended around it. It is a place where the secrets of history are kept. As children, we used to climb the hill surrounding the citadel on which it sits, looking over the city like a vulture protecting it from the mice of darkness. At that time, we were eager to discover some of the citadel’s secrets. The elders used to tell us there was a deep subterranean passage, leading far from the citadel to parts of the city, used to supply foodstuffs to the citadel when it was surrounded by invaders so that the defenders would be able to resist them. The Aleppans used to move into the citadel at times of attacks, and shut its gates. This passage was critical at both times of war and peace, when the ruler of the city would run away if the population rose against him. It was also used by lovers who used to go discreetly in and out. But we could not find the passage, though everyone knew it existed.

I remember one day they started to demolish an old house to construct a new building on the site. Excavations were going on when a dark passage was unearthed. It was part of a canal that ran under the city homes, just like the subway tunnels in some cities now. The vaulted ceiling was built with stones, while water flowed from its source and spread throughout the ancient city.

That was a very important moment in my life as a boy. My friends and I went down to examine it. It was a real world of magic and at the same time scary. We waded in the water that came from Hilan, a village to the north of the city. In every home, there was a well connected with the canal running under the ground.

In my novel The North Wind I wrote about how men used to hide in their homes from the eyes of the Ottoman Recruiting Units which were looking for young men to draft to fight in the First World War. When these young men felt the danger of these units which raided their homes, they went into the wells to hide in the canal, where their neighbors supplied them with food by ropes. It was also used by burglars and lovers. They would sneak out of the well at night to carry out their business, and then go down again into this ramified world that could take them to wherever they wanted.

The alleys in the ancient city, some of which are no more than 1.5 meters wide, diverged irregularly. Rooftops are attached and linked to each other. Since they are flat, it is easy to walk across them, moving from one rooftop to another. It is very suitable for burglars and those running away from the police, or from their parents or from jealous spouses. I myself used to move around these rooftops, to enjoy watching other people’s homes from the top. When I was a boy, before I was a teenager, there was a house where I saw a pretty young woman lying on a mattress beside a fountain in the courtyard. She used to wear bright, colored, see-through dresses. She would toss around waiting for someone, who never came. Was the world empty of men? I wondered.

Lately I heard that the fighting between the government troops and the opposition was taking place in the old city, which has resulted in the destruction of many houses there. This news scared me to death, and brought to mind my first visit to the Bahsita quarter in the heart of the old city. Bahsita is a place every young man must have visited at least once in his lifetime, either to have sex with a woman, or just to watch the women there. It is full of narrow alleys and houses like the traditional houses in the old city (I have described this quarter in my novel The Pastoral Comedy). In the evening the quarter becomes crowded with both visitors and spectators, while women sit in the courtyard of their houses, or in front of their houses in the narrow alleys wearing the scantiest clothes to expose their bodies to attract customers. There were also street vendors who sell sandwiches and tonic drinks for the men to restore their energy after they had sex, which was in most cases quick, but enjoyable. In this place I lost my innocence when I was sixteen years old. An experienced friend took me there to visit a woman who was in her forties, who, he said, understands young virgin boys, and helps them with patience. Indeed, he was right, because she understood my awkwardness at that time.

News of the battles going on in Aleppo’s ancient souk, and the fires that burnt a large number of shops there, made me think about the souk which is called al Medina, that is “the city” and considered the backbone of our lives. Al Medina is a network of narrow streets and alleys lined with shops on both sides, even though the alley is two meters wide or even less. For each trade there is a market, and discovering these thirty seven souks is an exciting tour I used to take before the holidays. These alleys are eight kilometers long and occupy seven hectares, all covered with vaulted roofs, and lit by the rays of sun through small windows at the top. More than twenty khans (caravanserais) occupy a part of these souks, decorated with striking architectural designs. These khans in the past were commercial centers receiving the convoys shuttling the Silk Road. Today they are very important commercial and industrial centres in the Syrian economy.

Discovering these souks filled me with joy in my boyhood. In every step I discovered a new and surprising secret, in particular, the Niswan Souk “the women’s market” which specialises in selling women’s stuff, from bridal dresses, to underwear and lingerie. Usually, the souk is crowded with women, and with one visit to the souk, one can discover what women wear for their husbands to make them continue to love them. In a shop window I once saw a two-piece underwear set which flashes with a light when touched by the husband. I wanted to discover the secrets of the world of these souks and khans. So I wrote the television series The Silk Market which observed and recorded the social, economic and political life in the 1950s to the early 1960s, in a period full of political turmoil. The series was filmed in the actual places, the traditional old souks, khans, alleys and homes in Aleppo, where the battles are taking place now, and where the government forces are bombing them using warplanes and artillery… Oh, my God!

It is not only the stones dating back to antiquity, but also the inhabitants of the city that keep its secrets. Foreign travelers and writers could not uncover the secrets of this city. They presented to their readers the surface image only, while the inner image remained uncovered, in particular the community of Allepian women, and their relationships. Specifically, a hidden phenomenon called the ‘intimate girls’.

Every Aleppian knew or had once heard about those intimate girls in the society of Aleppo. In order to understand the secret of this long tradition we should know that the local society used to separate women from men. However, women developed relationships with the same sex, even on an emotional level, for they were seeking a passionate and intimate social daily relationship. Men prevented their wives and daughters from mingling with men, but they allowed relationships with other women. Such a relationship developed sometimes, to its utmost limits, with men’s consent, or at least with their silence. We know the importance of music in the city. You can hardly find a home in the city without the musical instrument, the Oud, and some parents allowed their daughters to learn music and singing in order to have parties at home. Women used their musical skills in their daily meetings, especially, the intimate girls who used to meet on a certain day of the week. There, every woman would sit beside her girl friend, whom she calls Abla. They would sit very close to each other, wearing revealing clothes, singing and flirting. They would address each other with love lyrics, and dance together, caressing and kissing.

A long time ago I heard about these relationships and the intimate girls. I decided to write about those women so I wrote a novel A State of Passion. When I began my journey of study and research for the novel I found the only thing written about this in past literature was a few lines in the Comparable Aleppo Encyclopedia which addressed the linguistic, cultural and social aspects of the city. Therefore I set out to interview dozens of the well-known intimate girls, their acquaintances or relatives. The result was amazing. I discovered a wondrous hidden world of women’s relations, whose mainstay was friendship, love, intimacy, music, singing and dancing. It was a world of love, jealousy, betrayal, touching, and most often a world of sexual intimacy. A world where women with traditional lives and a husband away from home 12 hours a day found pleasure and emotional life without cheating on him with another man

I hope that the words I used to describe my city, Aleppo, do not become some kind of obituary for a dead city.

About the Author

Nihad Sirees is a civil engineer who lives in Aleppo. His novels include Cancer, The North Winds, A Case of Passion, and Noise and Silence. Of his many television dramas the most widely acclaimed, Silk Market, set in Aleppo during the political turmoil of the 1950s, was shown throughout the Middle East, in Germany and in Australia. His latest series, Al Khait Al Abiadh (‘The First Gleam of Dawn’), provides a frank depiction of the country’s government-controlled media. After increasing surveillance and pressure from the Syrian government, Nihad Sirees left Syria in 2012. He is currently at Brown University in the US on an International Writers Fellowship until the end of February 2013.

Additional Information

Nihad Sirees is touring the UK this month. He is appearing with Golan Haji and Robin Yassin-Kassab at the Southbank Centre on the 29th of January. To find out more information please follow this link.

He is also appearing at Waterstones Piccadilly on the 30th of January, alongside Malu Halasa and Ghalia Kabbani. To find out more about this event please follow this link.

The Silence and the Roar is translated by Max Weiss.

The post Geography of Secrets appeared first on English PEN.

And Other Stories – Stefan Tobler, Publisher

In 2013 we will pursue our slightly mad idea of publishing mainly translations, alongside some select books originally written in English, among them Deborah Levy’s astounding collection of stories Black Vodka in February.

Our first translation this year will be Oleg Pavlov’s Captain of the Steppe (April 2013, translated by Ian Appleby). The winner of the Russian Booker Prize and Solzhenitsyn Prize, among others, Pavlov is a highly acclaimed author. Think Kafka’s The Trial meets Catch-22: this is a largely comic novel that vividly exposes the absurd and tragic circumstances of an all but forgotten military camp where the guards are almost prisoners.

We will follow a new edition of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s incredible, Guardian First Book Award shortlisted Down the Rabbit Hole (April 2012, translated by Rosalind Harvey) with his second book, Quesadillas (September, also translated by Rosalind Harvey). Quesadillas is a novel for our moment – about social issues such as inequality and poverty; about what happens when a minority of powerful people mess everything up for everyone else. It’s also about growing up in a big family (where all the children have Hellenic names like Aristotle and Orestes). It’s more punk than Down the Rabbit Hole and the humour is even blacker.

Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs are Blue (August, translated by Zöe Perry and myself) is a fiery and humorous tale of life in a Rio insane asylum – and never has an asylum had a more engaging, amusing guide. Our narrator appears more worried about his widening girth and the Rio funk blaring from the nearby favela that keeps him awake at night than anything more sinister. He’s loco-lite. All Dogs are Blue burst onto the Brazilian literary scene in 2008. Its raw style and comic invention were something entirely new. But as fate would have it, it would be the last masterpiece Rodrigo de Souza Leão wrote. He died that year, aged 43. His work is currently being filmed. Our editor Sophie Lewis and I had come to the book independently and loved it. It was an easy choice.

Iosi Havilio’s Paradises (October) is our final translation of 2013, translated by Beth Fowler. This intriguing, brilliantly new novel from Iosi Havilio takes up some themes and characters from his debut Open Door(which we published in 2011). Its rebellion is in writing a story about a woman with a young child, who just wants a normal life. If that is possible. Havilio and Paradises in particular have already been singled out by the most influential Argentinean critic, Beatriz Sarlo (author of the study Borges). Havilio finds just the right, understated tone as he presents real, complex people in the full mystery of their unexpected reactions and interactions. His books divide their readers – you’ll love them or hate them! And I think that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

Arcadia – Gary Pulsifer, Publisher

The two new titles I am especially excited about this year are Gunnar Staalesen’s latest crime novel Cold Hearts, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and set in Norway’s second city of Bergen, and Africa, My Passionby Corinne Hofmann, translated from the German by Peter Millar. We will be reprinting earlier EuroCrime titles by Staalesen to coincide with release of the new novel, as well as a reprint of Hofmann’s The White Masai – Hofmann’s memoirs have sold over 150,000 copies for us and millions worldwide.

We are also reprinting They Were Counted, Book I of Count Miklos Banffy’s marvellous Transylvanian trilogy which charts the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as seen through the eyes of two very different cousins.  Paddy Leigh Fermor provided the foreword and the trilogy has taken off across Europe with Chinese rights most recently sold.  A true classic of world literature.  The translation from the Hungarian is by Countess Banffy and Patrick Thursfield, winners of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Book III.

Bloomsbury – Bill Swainson, Senior Commissioning Editor

In 2013 Bloomsbury will be publishing three very different but outstanding novels from Cuba, France and Israel – each also an exceptional work of translation:

Delphine de Vigan: Nothing Holds Back the Night (July – translated from the French by George Miller) – The third novel to be published in English by the best-selling author of No and Me, Nothing Holds Back the Night was nominated for eight of France’s top literary prizes, winning two of them (including the FNAC). It marks a huge step forward for this gifted novelist, combining humour, intellectual honesty, emotional sensitivity and a disarming clarity of expression in a masterpiece of autofiction about the author’s mother.

Zeruya Shalev: The Remains of Love (August – translated from the Hebrew by Philip Simpson) – Zeruya Shalev’s electrifying new novel – she is the author of Love Life, Husband and Wifeand Late Family – is at once a meditation on the state of modern Israel and a profound exploration of family, yearning, compromise and the insistent pull of the past.

Carlos Acosta: Pig’s Foot (October – translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne) – Carlos Acosta is best known as one of the world’s top ballet dancers, spellbinding audiences with towering performances in the likes of Spartacus and Romeo and Juliet. Pig’s Foot, four years in the writing, sets out to tell an alternative history of Cuba from the slave trade to the revolution and beyond as seen through the eyes of its less than reliable narrator, Oscar Mandinga. Rumbustious, darkly funny, defiant and ultimately moving, it’s an astonishing first novel.

Doubleday – Jane Lawson, Editorial Director 

If I Close My Eyes Now by Edney Silvestre (May), translated by Nick Caistor, a prize-winning Brazilian debut in the tradition of I’m Not Scared and Stand by Me. Set in 1960s small-town Brazil, two boys discover the body of a dead woman while playing near a mango plantation. They refuse to accept the official line about her death and together with an old man and a nun, they uncover the real motives behind her murder. Compelling and moving, this tale of loss of innocence coupled with a riveting crime plot and social commentary marks a new phase in contemporary Brazilian writing.

Europa Editions – Daniela Petracco, UK Director

Viola Di Grado: 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (January, translated by Michael Reynolds):

Viola Di Grado was 23 when her debut novel was published in Italy.  It was a runaway success and went on to win the Campiello First Novel Award and was shortlisted as a finalist for the Strega Prize.

The tragic death of her father plunges Camelia and her mother into a depression so deep it stops time and voids words of meaning, and only decapitating flowers and morbidly customising clothes offer relief. A budding romance with shop owner Wen seem to offer a way out, and as he teaches her Chinese ideograms, Camelia comes to see the world anew. But Wen has troubles of his own…. and as Camelia is left behind by her mother’s recovery, the story winds up to a devastating conclusion.

Ioanna Karystiani: Back to Delphi (March, translated by Konstantine Matsoukas): Ioanna Karystiani is one of Greece’s foremost writers, author of The Jasmine Isle and winner of the Greek National Book Award.

Viv Koleva is a woman with a heavy secret.  The novel opens as she takes a trip to Delphi with her grown-up son Linus.  They wander among the ruins, Viv single-mindedly trying to infect her son with her enthusiasm for the ancient art and myths.  But Linus remains taciturn and withdrawn.  By degrees we find out that Linus is a convicted criminal. And his mother too has a lot to answer for. Back to Delphi is a powerful novel about the responsibility parents carry for the actions of their children, and their ultimate helplessness.

May will be busy for Europa. We are kicking off our Noir Season with the reissue – and Europa UK launch, having recently secured UK rights – of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy: Total Chaos, Chourmoand Solea(Total Chaos used to be published in the UK by Arcadia but it’s been out of print for some time now, Chourmo and Solea have not been published before in the UK).  With a brand new Introduction by Massimo Carlotto and translated by Howard Curtis.

The Marseilles Trilogy, featuring ex-cop Fabio Montale, is a classic of European crime fiction, the catalyst for the foundation of an entire literary movement, Mediterranean Noir.

The trilogy’s plot centres on ex-cop Fabio Montale and his fight against villains in the grittier side of Marseilles.  Innocence is fleeting, everyone is flawed and everything is in flux. Izzo’s novels show us the simmering anti-immigrant sentiments flowing through southern France as the intersections of competing interests of right-wingers, the mafia, and Arab immigrants combine to wreak havoc onto Montale’s increasingly complicated life.

We are also launching Garlic, Mint and Sweet Basil, a little book of unpublished/selected writings by Jean-Claude Izzo, a love song to Marseilles, its inhabitants and the earthy flavours of its cuisine.

Also in May, we will publish the new novel by Massimo Carlotto translated by Antony Shugaar. At the End of a Dull Day is a wonderfully sleazy story of crime and corruption in which Carlotto proves just how good he is at creating a central character, both morally dubious and unsympathetic, and compelling all the same.

Giorgio Pellegrini has been living an “honest” life for eleven years.  But his lawyer has been deceiving him and now Giorgio is forced into service as an unwilling errand boy for an organized crime syndicate.  A sharp insight into the intersecting worlds of corrupt politics and organised crime.

Another title to watch in our Noir Season is Patrizia Rinaldi’s Three, Imperfect Number(August, translated by Antony Shugaar). Two bodies, one a celebrity’s, the other unidentified. Each is found in a football stadium, in the foetal position and without signs of violence. A daring challenge left by a psychopath for the police? Unassuming Commissario Martuscello is in charge of the investigation, with the aristocratic inspector Liguori, and superintendent Blanca Occhiuzzi, who, blind from birth, relies on her intuition to see much farther than her colleagues. Saturated with an exotic musicality, this is something different for fans of crime fiction and lovers of literary fiction alike.

Faber and Faber – Lee Brackstone, Editorial Director, Fiction

In 2013 Faber will publish three new writers in translation for the first time, from wildly different corners of the globe. The first of these will be Sicilian writer Giorgio Vasta’s incendiary debut, Time on my Hands, translated by Jonathan Hunt, set in Palermo in the late ’70s. Ian Thomson reviewing the Italian edition in the TLS said it is ‘without question one of the most important novels to emerge from Italy in the past ten years.’

In May, a month after Vasta, we will publish the young Argentine writer, Patricio Pron. One of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists, Pron’s novel, My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain translated by Mara Lethem, is again set in the ’70s during Argentina’s dirty wars. The ambition and style of the novel bring to mind early Kundera, and Juan Gabriel Vasquez has called it ‘a moving exploration of guilt and memory, and an unflinching study of what history can do to us.’

Finally, in the summer, we will publish the epic German bestseller and winner of The German Book Prize, In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge, translated by Anthea Bell. In unforgettable style, Ruge documents the social, political and cultural history of East Germany through the prism of one family across the best part of the twentieth century. There are shades of Jonathan Franzen here, but Ruge’s novel is definitively its own thing over almost 600pages of shimmering prose.

Granta/Portobello Books – Laura Barber, Editorial Director 

This year brings new books from two Granta authors who made their English-language debuts last year: Peter Stamm, who follows his acclaimed novel Seven Years with a collection of stories called We’re Flying (translated from the German by Michael Hoffman), which charts with extraordinary precision the impulses that determine the course of ordinary lives. And from the young Latin American author of the novel Faces in the Crowd comes Sidewalks (translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney), a series of literary journeys around the margins of metropolitan life that demonstrates Valeria Luiselli’s equal virtuosity as a writer of non-fiction.

Portobello welcomes three new authors, from France, Italy and Japan.  A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli (translator tbc) – an English-language debut for a prize-winning French writer, this novel is a miniature masterpiece: a sparse, stunning story of three SS officers who share a meal with their Jewish prisoner and face a chilling choice. Fabio Stassi’s Charlie Chaplin’s Last Dance(translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley) is a brilliantly inventive novel about the final years of Charlie Chaplin’s life, which is both a vivacious portrait of a comic legend and a love letter to the era of silent cinema: a must-read for fans of The Artist. Strange Weather in Tokyoby Hiromi Kawakami (translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell) – just long-listed for the Man Asia Prize, already a best-seller across Europe and soon to be a movie, this is a short, simple and incredibly touching story of modern Japan and old-fashioned romance.

And finally, a Portobello book that shows not so much what is lost in translation as what is found: Multiples: 12 Stories in 18 Languages by 61 Authors.  Masterminded by Adam Thirlwell and featuring an all-star international line-up of writers from Zadie Smith to Alejandro Zambra, via Javier Marias, Etgar Keret and Jeffrey Eugenides, this is an ingenious game of literary Chinese whispers, in which stories pass from hand to hand, from language to language, changing all the while, with surprising, thought-provoking, and frequently funny results.

Harvill Secker – Liz Foley, Publishing Director 

Revengeis a collection of short stories from one of my favourite writers, Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, which we will publish in January. These are beautifully dark and creepy. Hilary Mantel calls her ‘original, elegant, very disturbing’.

On the thriller front, we have the The Andalucian Friend by Alexander Söderberg in March. This is translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith. It’s the first in an international crime trilogy that we’re very excited about. It centres around a young woman who gets caught up in the activities of two warring crime families and finds that the police force investigating them is as dangerous as the criminals themselves.

In April we have the second volume of the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s magnum opus, A Man in Love.Everyone in the office is obsessed with these books – they are completely addictive in a way that it’s impossible to explain. The first volume, A Death in the Family, was broadly about the author’s father’s death and this one is about love and marriage, but again it’s actually about so much more than this and is everything you want from a novel. This is translated by Don Bartlett.

In May we have Harvill favourite Manuel Rivas’ All is Silence, translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne. This is a novel about young friends growing up in Galicia and becoming entangled with the local crime lord. This book was shortlisted for the Rómulo-Gallegos-Prize.

Finally our lead translated title for the year is, unsurprisingly, Jo Nesbo’s Police (translated by Don Bartlett), which we have scheduled for the autumn. We’re also excited to be publishing the second Harry Hole book in the series, Cockroaches, later in the year so that the series will finally be complete for English-language readers.

Pushkin Press – Adam Freudenheim, Publisher and Managing Director

This year Pushkin Press will continue its focus on international fiction, but from a wider array of languages.  In January we publish the powerful, timely yet also funny and sensuous The Silence and the Roar by Syrian writer Nihad Sirees, translated by Max Weiss.  In April, for the first time in English, we publish a wonderful century-old Greek book called A Tale Without a Name by Penelope Delta, translated by Mika Provata-Carlone – a fable for our times if ever there was one, about a corrupt kingdom brought to its senses by a prince who realises that if only people would work together the world would be a happier place indeed.  In May, something completely different as acclaimed cult Japanese writer Ryu Murakami comes to the Pushkin Press list for the first time. We’re thrilled to be publishing Murakami’s major new novel From the Fatherland, with Love translated by Ralphy McCarthy, Charles De Wolf and Ginny Tapley Takemori, alongside the first UK publication of his modern classic Coin Locker Babies, translated by Stephen Snyder, and two other titles.  If you haven’t yet experienced a Murakami novel, you’re in for a shock and a treat!

Weidenfeld & Nicholson – Kirsty Dunseath, Fiction Publishing Director 

In July next year we are publishing the English translation of Gregoire Delacourt’s fantastic novel The List of My Desires (La liste de mes envies), translated by Anthea Bell. Set in the French town of Arras, it is the story of Jocelyne who runs her own dressmaking shop. She’s 47, overweight, a little bored with her husband, and perhaps a little disappointed with the way her life has turned out, measuring it against what her teenage self had imagined. But then is she really unhappy? She has her weekends away, her friendships, her sewing blog, her work and its small pleasures… Then her best friends persuade Jocelyn to enter the Euromillion lottery and she wins. She could do anything with the money, change her life completely, but what does she really want? And what if changing your life isn’t all it is cracked up to be…? La liste de mes envies has been a number one bestseller in France, on the bestseller lists now for ten months, with rights sold in 27 countries.

The post Publishers’ highlights for 2013 appeared first on English PEN.

The looking back and summing up season is upon us, and I’d like briefly to look at the PEN Atlas as it nears the end of its first year of life. Our main aim has been to look at new voices and literature all over the world and to introduce them to an audience in the UK by commissioning new and original blogs written by writers, critics and translators.

English PEN itself has a translation programme helping both the promotion and translation of international literature via two Writers in Translation Awards – PEN Translates! and PEN Promotes! – and some of the books featured in the Atlas come to us through these grant schemes.

In many of our 2012 blogs we looked at how writers dealt with political problems and conflicts in their countries, in this way supporting the core PEN activity of defending and promoting the freedom to write and the freedom to read. We will be returning to many of these countries again next year, as unfortunately most of the conflicts covered by the Atlas are still underway. These continue to make it difficult for writers to express themselves freely as well as endangering their lives. Samar Yazbek wrote to us from Syria about the perils of reporting from a war zone and in January we will have another Syrian, Nihad Sirees, one of the winners of a 2013 English PEN Writers in Translation Award, writing about Aleppo and its incomprehensible destruction. And later in the year we will be covering another of the PEN Award Winners: Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, which compiles some of the most exciting new writing borne out of the Arab Spring.

Hassan Blasim discussed the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the role literature plays in how society deals with tragic events. The Devil’s Workshop by Jachym Topol, again one of the winners of a Writers in Translation Award, deals with the more distant past of concentration camps in Belarus. We will be talking to Jachym Topol later this year.

Selma Dabbagh wrote very movingly from the Palestinian Literary Festival about the fragile situation in Gaza. Alas, the crisis there has deepened and we will return to the festival next year to look at the response of writers to the events there. Lydia Cacho’s reporting from Mexico has won awards and accolades. For us, she wrote about taking risks and being afraid. She is still reporting and still in danger.

We hope that as the reviewing space in print media shrinks, PEN Atlas, like some other literary websites, is filling that gap and providing more outlets for literary criticism and debate.

We also have been following trends and reported on developments in international publishing by featuring specialists’ opinions. We have looked out for new writers who might be interesting for a British audience and for publishers here. In this way, we have introduced Alisa Ganieva from Dagestan, Yuri Herrera from Mexico and Park Wan-Suh from South Korea among others.

PEN Atlas dispatches in 2012 took us all over the world, from Mexico and China to Greece, the Netherlands, Croatia and Russia. And as we continue to explore the world’s literature in the New Year, we hope to bring you closer to interesting places and introduce you to new writers.

And if you still have any presents to buy, you might find inspiration here in our list of books recommended by publishers, writers and festival organisers. And for literary inspiration look at one of our most moving stories this year – Santiago Gamboa’s ‘Of Poets and Aviators’.

In the meantime, happy festive reading and all the very best in the New Year!

Tasja Dorkofikis,

Editor, PEN Atlas

The post PEN Atlas – One Year On appeared first on English PEN.