July 2019 translation news roundup
Here’s the literary and translation news you may have missed on your summer vacation!
PRIZES
The Man Booker Prize longlist(opens in a new tab) is here, with winners to be announced September 3
Nominees for the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature(opens in a new tab) are out!
The Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes(opens in a new tab) were announced earlier this month
NEWS
Booksellers Tom Roberge and Emma Ramadan on selling uncommon books(opens in a new tab): “You could insert a ton of small or translation press books into any bookstore and people would find them and love them.”
Beautiful libraries around the world(opens in a new tab) that every book lover should visit
2018 Man Booker International Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk considers how translators are saving the world(opens in a new tab)
And a close-up look at Olga Tokarczuk’s Novels Against Nationalism(opens in a new tab)
Check out this Twitter thread(opens in a new tab) of lists of international authors (living or dead) that everyone should read
A translator on translating garbage(opens in a new tab)
In California, a multimedia project(opens in a new tab) is documenting efforts by indigenous communities to preserve disappearing languages
READING LIST
In case you missed it, check out a Bookseller’s (late) Summer Reading list
Acclaimed Spanish translator Edith Grossman talks gender in translation, free time, and more in this interview(opens in a new tab)
With several new titles in English translation (most translated by Bright translator Mui Poopoksakul) and the launch of the Bangkok Literary Review, Thai literature reaches West(opens in a new tab)
If you’re headed to Thailand soon, here are 5 books to read before your Thailand holidays(opens in a new tab)
In the Kenyon Review, Mira Rosenthal asks forty-nine questions about what we mean when we talk about the translator’s voice(opens in a new tab).
Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was featured in The New Yorker(opens in a new tab): “As Scego’s book explores layers of time and branches of families, it suggests that no history is ever as certain as it seems at first glance.”
On the Seawall(opens in a new tab) reviews Beyond Babylon: ‘In portraying the inner lives of refugee women and their first-generation, immigrant daughters, Scego has created a work of great empathy that is a testament to the psychological dissonance that refugees suffer as they remake lives in foreign places while under the pervasive shadow of brutal pasts.
Boston Globe books columnist Nina MacLaughlin includes Two Lines Press on her list of small publishers “doing knock-out work”(opens in a new tab)
