When Mariia Niskavaara went on holiday, she came back to find that her lettuces had run wild. “They grew themselves long stems and started flowering, and good God they were gorgeous. I realized that if lettuces had their way, that’s…
When Mariia Niskavaara went on holiday, she came back to find that her lettuces had run wild. “They grew themselves long stems and started flowering, and good God they were gorgeous. I realized that if lettuces had their way, that’s…
Going to your friends’ cabin in the mountains is a treat. But if even if you know them and the place well, you might be unsure about how it will work out. If they pop into town and leave you…
When you’ve got a Man Booker International winner (Marlon James) on your books, you could sit back and relax. Or you could find the next big thing before it happens. That’s what Oneworld has done, buying the world English rights…
Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature for her “Polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Born in Ukraine to a Ukrainian mother and a Belarusian father, she worked as…
English PEN has just announced more support for independent publishers to publish works in translation, which is great news since the independents are the ones producing the really interesting stuff. Their world bookshelf of contemporary writers in supported by the PEN…
At Read Paper Republic, you can find a new Chinese writing every week for a year. The editors want to introduce Chinese short stories, essays and poems for free, to people who don’t know where to start. And they start…
The Women’s World Cup of Literature kicks off today, with a Francophone first fixture. I wasn’t the only one to be both delighted by a world cup I really wanted to follow last year, but complain about the lack of female…
Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky, has variously been described as brutal, haunting, and dreamlike, unvarnished and the work of a miniaturist. It’s all that and more. And it’s a very fitting first German winner of…