International Writing
This page features 'A View From This Bridge', our weekly blog on international literature and the art of editing by editor Briony Everroad and various guests. We also pick a 'featured read' and have a regular 'Armchair Traveller' piece about the literature of a particular country. You will find previous 'Armchair Traveller' pieces archived in the left-hand menu. (Due to a technical hitch with the blog archive, click here for blogs 1 to 30.)
We are very sad to say goodbye to Rebecca Carter who has started this amazing page, but Briony Everroad is thrilled to be taking over the reins.
A VIEW FROM THIS BRIDGE
Blog 35: Crossing Border
Briony Everroad talks about her visit to Crossing Border Festival in The Netherlands
November, The Hague. Gradually six young translators emerge from the fog into the beautiful Pulchri Studio set in a tree-lined avenue. My job for the day? To be a fly on the wall. What a lovely location for a fly.
In a breathtakingly elegant space that which I decide must have been a ballroom, I sit with Nick Caistor and Beth Fowler at a table that takes up a surprisingly large portion of the room. Beth won the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize in 2010, and participation in The Chronicles programme at the Crossing Border festival is part of the award.
FEATURED READ
In November we published a brand new novel by Bernardo Atxaga, Seven Houses in France. Moving away from his native Basque country, Atxaga ventures into the heart of the Belgian Congo where soldiers transform the jungle into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. The novel is a blackly comic tale that reveals the darkest sides of human desire.
‘Seven Houses in France is an enjoyable, somewhat frightening novel by one of Europe’s best novelists... Atxaga is still the master of a complex story, told with deceptive simplicity.’ Michael Eaude, Independent
‘Atxaga’s story is fresh, his treatment of violence psychologically rich. The writing is sharp and often funny.’
Miranda France, Guardian
ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER
Bernardo Atxaga shares some of his favourite books from around the world
—Stephen Spender. World within World.
—Peter Kropotkin. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.
—Mohamed Choukri. For bread alone.
—Seamus Heaney. Death of a Naturalist.
—Bertold Brecht. Poems.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. The Waste books.
—Jean Itard. The wild boy of Aveyron.
—Samuel Beckett. First Love.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Confessions.
—E.H. Gombrich. The Story of Art.