English PEN is running a competition for the best book its supported through its Writers in Translation programme. Among these is Witold Szabłowski’s The Assassin from Apricot City translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The book about Turkey, migrants, people smuggling and much more was excerpted in B O D Y when it was […]
“The moon has gone down, disappeared somewhere; the stars are now a pale yellow colour and fast fading, all the merriment having gone from them. Dew is falling as Ester carries the milk pail, says czokolom, thank you, in their language and tries to squeeze past the old woman on her way out. But the […]
“It all began with a rather unusual encounter in a first-class compartment of the Belgrade-Skopje express train.” So begins Aleksandar Prokopiev’s short story “Papradishki” translated from the Macedonian by Will Firth. But from the beginning, which could be the opening chapter of a detective novel with references to Hercule Poirot and Maigret, the story enters […]
From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
One of the great Czech modernists Richard Weiner has finally been translated into English, with the novel The Game For Real in a translation by Benjamin Paloff being published by Two Lines Press this week. Read an excerpt in B O D Y here Like Kafka, Weiner never lived to see his writing appreciated, this […]
“Applause to the mosquito – its blood-gorged pitch, Its trembling shadow, threaten the hunter with Rapture and prick of sorrow, once the battle is done And your combatant’s bitten the dust, filled with you.” From one of the three poems by Polina Barskova in B O D Y translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale. […]
An essay in B O D Y on the life of Hans Christian Andersen, a life as bizarre in many ways as anything the writer conjured up in his well-known stories. Here is Rudnicki on Andersen writing his autobiography, The Fairytales of my Life: “Only the title is honest– everything else is made up. He […]
This evening at 6:30 GMT four contemporary European writers from across the continent will be in London for the Euro Stars series readings and debates, hosted by journalist Rosie Goldsmith at London’s Europe House. The readers, all EUPL-award winners: Pierre J. Mejlak (Malta) Evie Wyld (England ) Janis Jonevs (Latvia) Çiler İlhan (Turkey) Read some […]
If you’re at the London Book Fair today you can attend a discussion this evening on the broader and still broadening scope of contemporary Czech writing with translators Julia Sherwood, Alex Zucker and hosted by editorial director of Words without Borders Susan Harris. Sherwood is the translator of B O D Y’s most recent Saturday […]
B O D Y’s series of European fiction in translation, Saturday European Fiction, has now reached the end of its second year and so a summing up of sorts is in order. While the vast majority of writers published come from Central and Eastern Europe, year two has seen the geographical range expand a bit […]
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