Find out what's new on our websites, where we've been, what's on our minds and the things we're doing.
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Whose Muse Is It Anyway? match report
Posted Tuesday June 22nd 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaLast Thursday, we decided to try something different. Wanting to put on a celebration event for our former writer-in-residence Nii Ayikwei Parkes, we decided to put on a different type of poetry evening (knowing, somewhat self-referentially, that calling it ‘a poetry evening… with a difference’ doomed it to failure). The whole point of the writer-in-residence programme, which has featured exclusive blogs and work from Patrick Ness, Evie Wyld and Nii Ayikwei Parkes , has been to make different types of writing accessible to all. How best, we wondered, to make poetry accessible.
First of all, with open source technology like Ustream available, we can live-stream everything we do online so that people who don’t live in London, who don’t have nights near them, can get involved and thus interact with us on things like Twitter and Facebook.
Secondly, we needed to come up with a format that circumvented the traditional poetry evening. It appeared to us in a dream: what is we do a poetry version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? With Nii up for it, the concept for Whose Muse Is It Anyway? was born.
To do improvised poetry is hard, especially when lots of parameters are…
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Don't Quote Me On This...
Posted Tuesday June 22nd 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaThe edit’s done, the cover-concept has been chosen and the release date has been set. Now how to help convince reviewers, readers, librarians, booksellers, publishers, bloggers, tenuous Facebook friends and my parents that my book is worth picking up and reading.
One of the ways new writers these days get their star to rise is through the testimonials and quotes on their books. When you’re on a small respected independent like I am, when column inches for literature coverage in newspapers have been reduced, when journalists are more likely to cover big names and newcomers of note, the likelihood of you being able to place an extract of a review from a properly-respected paper on the front of your book is slim. Also, it seems that despite the existence of incredibly well-respected literary blogs, like Dove Grey Reader and Rob Around Books, we don’t seem to have arrived at the time where you can get away with having a recommendation from an online-only review on the front of your book. I’m sure this will change in months to come as more blogs spring up around e-readers and digital literature, responding to the new army of online-storytelling. So who…
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On attending the Orange Prize award ceremony...
Posted Monday June 14th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaAfter two sets of readings and one swanky awards ceremony, two of the biggest prizes for literature: the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Orange Award for New Writers have been announced. Barbara Kingsolver and Irene Sabatini are deserved winners of the prizes and it was great to see them last week be passionate about their work.
It was a strange start to the week though. There I was sat next to two other men listening to Lennie Goodings, an editor at Virago and Suzanne Read, a newsreader, discuss how men viewed books written by women, how women were more likely to read books irrespective of gender than men. They cited a recent men’s reading group experiment conducted by The Culture Show using the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist as an example. Looking to my left and my right, forwards and back, I noted that there was only a handful of men in the audience to see the Orange New Writers, and I was sat next to two of them. Lennie Goodings spoke passionately of the need for there to still be an Orange Prize and Suzanne spoke vividly about the last 15 years’ worth of winning books. Then the…
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A Taste of the Best Modern Spanish Fiction
Posted Monday June 14th 2010
by Ruth CollinsDebut blog from journalist Ruth Collins on the merits of modern Spanish fiction... hopefully you'll find it moy interessante.
Sometimes the prospect of reading a translated novel can seem a bit overwhelming, but it’s not all about the War and Peace’s and Don Quixote’s of this world. Many of you will have come across Lucia Graves’ beautiful translation of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind (La Sombra del Viento), but here I hope to draw attention to a taste of some lesser-known delights from peninsular Spain.
For anyone interested in the history of the Spanish Civil War, you cannot get much better than Juan Goytisolo. Although he has written many great novels, Marks of Identity (Señas de Identidad) tells the story of a Spanish exile’s return from Paris to his family home in Barcelona and provides a fantastic introduction to just some of the literature which was inspired by the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. Another worthwhile read is Soldiers of Salamis (Soldados de Salamina) by Javier Cercas, which humanely reveals how the Civil War has permeated Spain’s modern-day conscious. Anne McLean's translation of the novel was notably awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004.
For a…
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Orange Prize announcement... tonight!
Posted Wednesday June 9th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaTonight the winners of the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Orange Award for New Writers will be announced. Either follow us or the Orange Prize on twitter for the live announcement. In the meantime, check out the judges talking about the shortlists:
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Booktrust at London Book Fair
Posted Monday June 7th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaWhilst filming for two new Book Channel TV shows at the London Book Fair, presenter, Tina Bettison had a chat with Viv Bird, Chief Executive of Booktrust. Viv talks about the work that we are doing to engage young people with books, and there are extracts from the London Book Fair Equal Measures seminar featuring Nick Sharratt, Julia Donaldson and Michael Foreman.
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Time to Look for a Translation Job
Posted Tuesday June 1st 2010
by Catherine MansfieldIt’s the end of the university year and time for us translation MA students to leave the safety of weekly timetables, subtitling workshops and lectures on post-colonial translation theory and ask ourselves that scary question: what do we do now?
Our course leaders put together a careers day last week to give us some ideas, with talks by translators and interpreters, and tips on how to set up your own business.
One of the decisions we have to make is: in-house or freelance? However, it seems that many of us won’t really have a choice. There are not all that many in-house translation jobs around. The European Commission are actively looking for native-English in-house translators, but you have to be able to speak either French or German. So, no trips to Brussels for me, unfortunately.
This shortage of in-house translation work is bad news for a lot of us, as working in-house has a lot of advantages. Guaranteeing that you get some money in your bank account each month is obviously a plus. And then there’s the social side, having people to talk to. The importance of this was really driven home to us by a freelance translator who came…
