
The Book of Desire is a thing of beauty. It arrived wrapped in white and gold tissue, tied with natural string, packed in cardboard. These things matter. I thought someone had sent me a gift. Opening it was a ceremony.…
The Book of Desire is a thing of beauty. It arrived wrapped in white and gold tissue, tied with natural string, packed in cardboard. These things matter. I thought someone had sent me a gift. Opening it was a ceremony.…
We’ve waited twenty years for this. To be scrupulously honest, I haven’t, as when it won the Finlandia Prize in 2003, I couldn’t speak a word of Finnish. But Pirkko Saisio’s Punainen erokirja in Mia Spangenberg’s translation as the Red…
When Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature last autumn, I am ashamed to say I had never heard of her. Some French-speaking friends had loved her work for years. Two had learned French outside France, whereas friends who…
Five women in love. And then out of it. There aren’t going to be happy endings. Until, the author said, she talked to her daughter, and felt that she had to offer a bit of hope. Because what a lot…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. No, not that one, that’s not for a few weeks yet. Advent, the waiting. And who does Advent best? I’ve said it before – the Germans, of course. I haven’t lived in…
I bought this because of the translator. Caryl Lewis’s writing is tense and spare and true. I loved Y Gemydd which I read as The Jeweller in Gwen Davies’s translation, and Drift, her first novel in English. Then I found…
In April 1940, over twenty thousand Polish officers were killed by the Soviets in the forest of Katyń. A bare few hundred of those soldiers survived. The way I remember my grandfather telling the story of his capture on Poland’s…
Autumn fruit. Pears, apples, grapes… the orchards and vineyards are bursting with golden light. Yet the light is fading. The first frost bites. That’s the English title for you, Tasting Sunlight. But in German, Ewald Arenz called it Alte Sorten,…
A podiatrist’s story. She stopped writing to start looking after other people’s feet. She needed to make a living. Her fellow authors were not impressed. But from that experience, she crafted some impressive portraits of people and place. When many…
The Romanovs, Lenin, Gagarin – they all had their cooks. Holodomor, Leningrad, Chernobyl, Afghanistan – sometimes there is nothing (safe) to cook at all. For some people, like the Tatars, cooking is all you have left of home. Others, like…
Finland’s Gandalf is real. She forges fantastic fireworks, the like of which were never seen before. They dazzle the locals who’ve never been over the next hill – or heard of anyone under it. “You shall not pass!” she cries,…
Living in a building designed by Alvar Aalto is both unparalleled and uncomfortable. I have just moved out of Viitatorni (the “skyscraper” he finally got built in Jyväskylä after years of trying) into Säynätsalo Town Hall, into Säynätsalo Town Hall,…
A white, male, comfortably-off, widowed professor at a Berlin university has just retired. He meets Black African men seeking asylum in Europe. He tries to find out about them, and to help them. Not new, perhaps. Isn’t the whole perspective…
I am writing this as Afghanistan descends once more into horror. A tiny Welsh part of me still thinks “the bloody English colonials, look what they started and didn’t finish – again.” And you could read the Gododdin this way,…