The Prague book fair is underway and I had to take refuge from the Friday crowds of schoolchildren in my local café, which, as it turns out, is crowded with slightly older schoolchildren trying to look even older through chain-smoking and midafternoon glasses of wine. Book World Prague 2015’s Guest of Honor is Egypt and […]
Hungarian writer and foreign correspondent Sándor Jászberényi has an article (subscriber’s only though I managed to read it free the other day) on the death of a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter he had met and the particular significance of her being a woman. It’s a very powerful story and reminiscent of the writing in his story […]
I have been expressing my admiration for Central European crime writing since I was practically a baby, but being a baby no one understood what I was saying, so it took until I started Literalab and began writing about it that my admiration took on intelligible form. Since then I have surveyed regional crime fiction […]
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has been awarded the 2012 Found in Translation Award, the best Polish translator award funded by the Polish Book Institute. The award, which until now was given for a single book translated from Polish, was instead awarded to Lloyd-Jones for “the entirety of her output from the previous year”. And an impressive output […]
The 20th International Book Festival Budapest runs from April 18 to 21 with Italy as the country Guest of Honor and Michel Houellebecq as the writer Guest of Honor. Houellebecq’s novel Lanzarote will be published in Hungarian for the occasion. Among the Hungarian writers attending the festival are Noémi Szécsi, György Konrád, László Krasznahorkai and […]
Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
At The Guardian author of Madame Mephisto, A. M. Bakalar writes about the UK’s invisible Polish minority, describing the wide divergence in identities between those who think of themselves as British and those who continue to exist in an almost exclusively Polish environment. The all-too-common assumption of Poles coming to the UK for higher wages […]
New crime writing from the former Eastern Bloc – a list. Words Without Borders has just come out with its (Non-Scandinavian) Crime issue for December. It’s an excellent and varied selection though there is only one short piece from Eastern Europe in an extract from Sergey Kuznetsov’s Butterfly Skin translated by Andrew Bromfield. With that […]
There’s a burst of Polish crime in the UK this week starting at today’s Folkestone Book Festival with the appearance of A.M. Bakalar and Zygmunt Miłoszewski as part of Polish Book Autumnfest. Bakalar’s Madame Mephisto has been reviewed here, while I’ve only briefly noted Miłoszewski’s excellent Entanglement and will have a review of his recently […]
The fourth annual Conrad Festival begins on October 22 in Kraków, the city the great writer moved to as a child before he hit the seven seas and eventually settled down to become an Englishman. In fact, the festival has nothing to do with Joseph Conrad other than borrowing his lofty patronage to welcome similar […]
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