Yes, I did go to see Antigone at the Edinburgh Festival because Juliette Binoche was in the title role (I loved her work with Kieslowski, though unfortunately this time, images from Chocolat kept surfacing in my mind). And I made a discovery: Anne Carson’s new…
It’s European Literature Night tonight, and this whole week the British Academy in London is celebrating fairy tales. This lunchtime Jack Zipes, who translates fairy tales in German, Italian and English, will be talking at the British Academy about his The…
Tove Jansson was born 100 years ago today. If you live in Finland, you won’t have missed the anniversary Moomin mugs (with donations to UNICEF), the large and splendid retrospective of her work at the Ateneum national art gallery, or the…
Published in English this month, Slaves of Moscow tells the story of twelve Kazakhstani women enslaved in a Moscow grocery store. The Kazakhstani couple who owned the shop forced them to work 20 hours a day. Some even gave birth…
With a mission to bring new books from around the continent to the people, tonight is the sixth European literature night. In co-operation with 28 European National Institutes for Culture, the Czech organisers have brought the event to 24 cities this…
If you want someone’s mind to grow, you have to start a conversation with them as soon as they’re born. It’s not enough for them to hear language around them, adults talking to each other, people talking on TV or…
Once upon a time there was a little ghost. It lived all alone in the forest. All the other ghosts were born in the forest because they died there. They were very old or very young, and their families were…
New years’ resolutions can be overwhelming, if like me, you make a lengthy list and then struggle to live up to your own ideals, often failing within the first week. So this year I decided to choose one word to guide…
In the UK it is Children’s Book Week from 7-11 October. How many of those books are translated from other languages? Not many, unfortunately. Here are my top 3 for 2013: One of my favourites as a young child was…
Tove Jansson would be 99 today. I began learning Finnish by reading the Moomin comic strip, which made Tove Jansson’s name around the world. Started in the London Evening News in 1954, the complete collection is still being published in Finnish. Tove’s 1960s…
found in translation 