Category Archives: Events

Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival

March 25, 2024 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Last week I had a special experience. I was invited to the north eastern Indian state of Assam to participate in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. It was my second visit to Assam. Five years ago, I was part of the Brahmaputra Literary Festival, a wonderful experience that I recorded on this blog.

DUILF was organised by the Foundation for Culture, Arts & Literature (FOCAL) and curator and chief coordinator Rahul Jain, who also masterminded the Brahmaputra festival, so I knew that it would be a special occasion. Even so, I was not prepared for the warmth and celebration that met the writers from 17 countries who flew in to take part.

Literature festivals can often be quite clinical and hierarchical, with the red carpet rolled out for the big-name writers and relatively little welcome extended to those with less following. In Dibrugarh, however, everyone was an honoured guest. Our faces were featured on banners lining the roads around the university campus, and we were all greeted and entertained as celebrities.

And there were some real celebrities in the mix. A number of India’s most revered contemporary writers were on the bill, among them the legendary Tamil author Ambai. She spoke incredibly powerfully about her experience as a feminist writer over a career spanning more than 60 years. I have since started reading her short stories and have been blown away.

I was also delighted to chair a session with prolific Malayalam author Benyamin, whose Goat Days (translated by Joseph Koyippally) is set to be a major film, and to speak to Goan author Damodar Mauzo, who writes in Konkani, the only language to appear in five different scripts. A winner of countless awards, including the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, he is an inspiration. It was humbling to hear about his process – which draws on the fine observation of small details, many of them gleaned while minding his shop – and thought-provoking to listen to him talk about his experience of finding his stories celebrated in English decades after he wrote them.

From further afield, some of the other key figures included Ukrainian writers Irena Karp and Halyna Kruk, who heard she had been longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize during the festival; Caribbean region Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2016 winner Lance Dowrich; and Australian writer Kate Mildenhall, with whom I had the luxury of a staged conversation about our writing journeys.

This session also delivered one of my personal highlights. During the question and answer section, a young man stood up and said that he had a confession to make: he had found The World Between Two Covers (the US edition of my Reading the World book) in a library in 2015 and been so gripped by it that he couldn’t bear to return it. He had it still. For me it was a moment of real joy – and a reminder of the extraordinary power of writing to link us across boundaries of all kinds.

I also had the privilege of taking my Incomprehension Workshop to the festival. I was a little apprehensive as to how it would be received: although I have run versions of it with readers of many different backgrounds, this would be my first experience of trying it with people raised exclusively in a rather different education system.

My fears proved unfounded. The audience, consisting largely of university students, proved to be the most imaginative and receptive I have ever worked with. Their responses and reactions were incredibly creative and warm. They taught me anew the value of this work, enthusing me for the final stages of drafting my next book on reading, drawing on my work with incomprehension over the last few years, details of which I’ll be sharing here soon.

As in Guwahati, at the Brahmaputra festival, my conversations with curator Rahul Jain proved inspiring too. I was particularly struck by something he told me on the last day, when a few of us were sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting to leave for the airport. The wonderful way the festival celebrated writers came up for discussion, prompting Jain to share his perspective. It was simple, he said. In Buddhism there is the concept of dependent origination: a thing can only be what it is meant to be by virtue of other things. He cannot be a husband without his wife; he cannot be a father without his children. The same is true of his role as a festival coordinator: he cannot be this without writers. Therefore it is his duty to honour them and readers because they make him who he is.

2024: My year of reading nothing new

January 20, 2024 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , 17 Comments

This week, Renard Press, publisher of my most recent novel, included a note on royalties in the regular newsletter it sends to its authors. Discussing the focus on bestseller sales figures in the anglophone book world, publisher Will Dady wrote this:

Because publishers don’t publish hard data about sales (and I do think this is a good thing, because I don’t think art should be reduced to sums, products and units), the majority of information about book sales comes from Nielsen Book Scan, the industry reporting company, which details sales made through reporting avenues. As such, it’s tempting to look at Nielsen’s data – e.g., looking at the Bookseller from last week, Richard Osman’s latest sold 5,272 copies in the week, Grisham’s latest sold 1,157, etc – and compare unfavourably to these numbers. But this is not the sort of publishing we’re doing here. This is big-budget, mass-market fiction, in general chasing trends, aiming for big sales on day one and then more often than not going out of print within two years.

I don’t think this Pile ’em High publishing does anyone any favours when we’re talking about literary fiction. In my (oh so humble) opinion it’s devoid of personality, wasteful of resources and disrespectful of those who carefully crafted the work, as it means giving away huge discounts, often paying for inclusion and placement, overprinting copies and then remaindering or destroying them, and in the end netting the author and publisher a comparative pittance.

Interestingly, the other side of Big Publishing’s sales isn’t discussed very often – those who fall by the wayside. If you’re not Grisham, David Walliams or the small handful of beautiful young things tipped to be the Next Big Thing, what happens? According to data from the S&S/Penguin trial in the States, half of all the Big Five’s titles sell a grand total of 12 copies or less. Yes, astounding. (And one wonders what discount those were sold at, too…)

So what makes good sales for indies – or rather, for anything apart from Richard Osman and Co? Well, again, it’s difficult to know. There’s a great piece on Jericho Writers’ website here from Sam Jordison, of Galley Beggar fame – and as he says, while the 3,000 copies number often does the rounds for mass-market fiction, it’s thought to be more like 250 copies for literary fiction – and far less for poetry (as pithily put in the Bookseller, ‘Even in this record year [2022], Julia Donaldson will outsell the entire UK poetry market’, and the Poet Laureate’s whole backlist sold in a year half of what Osman’s latest novel did in a week), and theatre titles tend to be linked to productions. So I’m pleased to look at our royalty reports and see our writers easily outselling at least half of Penguin’s list, and finding – and, crucially, speaking to – readers in the face of a fragmented market and great adversity. 

I feel I need to end this note with a contentious, ‘And what does it matter?’ While sales figures are of course important, and give an idea of how many people have pored over your work over time, looking beyond numbers is vital, and I firmly believe your work enriches the literary canon of our age. I couldn’t be prouder of the list we’ve built and the community you’re part of. We’ve all put our all into these books, and Renard commits to keeping you in print for all the readers that are yet to come. 

Dady’s words struck a chord with me. They helped crystallise some issues that have been on my mind for a while. I’m fortunate that all three of my books continue to be available in most of the territories in which they have been published, but I have seen how the relentless focus on what’s coming next leads to many titles being ignored, falling off the shelves and out of print without a trace.

In some cases, the speed with which this happens verges on the unethical. Many new authors never stand a chance of reaching readers, leading some to feel that they have been let down by those they trusted with their work. There is also the problem of the waste of resources pumped into producing books that can never reasonably be expected to sell in significant numbers – something becoming ever harder to defend.

All this is rarely the fault of individuals. Many of those I have met at big publishers are brilliant and passionate, and care deeply about getting great work to readers. But the system has become so beholden to the bottom line and so weighted towards those all-important early sales figures that it’s almost impossible for new or different work to make a lasting impact.

This is one of the reasons that many of the titles I feature on this blog are not new: I want to do what I can in my small way to help prolong the shelf-life of great books. And it’s one of the reasons why I enjoy the podcast Backlisted, which celebrates old books, albeit largely anglophone ones. (Well worth a listen if you’re a podcast fan.)

However, I think I could do more.

As an individual reader, it’s easy to feel you can’t do much to make a difference. But I have seen from the exchanges I’ve had through this project and from the success of initiatives such as Women in Translation how personal choices can influence others and drive change.

With this in mind, I am making 2024 my year of reading nothing new. Excluding those titles I have to read for work and research (and those handful of books I have already promised to look at), I plan not to read or feature any titles published after 2020 on this blog this year.

To this end, I’d love your recommendations of older books in translation or from elsewhere that deserve a second look. Maybe you’re a translator who feels one of your favourite projects never got enough attention. Perhaps you’re a publisher who wishes more people could find that title you fell in love with a decade ago. It could be that you’re a reader who still thinks about a particular novel several years after you finished it. Whatever the story, I’d love you to tell me about it.

And if you fancy joining me on this adventure or have made similar book choices in the past, it would be lovely to hear from you too. Happy reading!

Picture: ‘Recycled books at Big River Books’ by Beau Claar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Refugee Week: Writers on Connecting Through Storytelling

July 10, 2023 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

During Refugee Week in the UK, I had the privilege of chairing a Zoom discussion about writing stories that cross national boundaries, and explore migration and asylum-seeking. Hosted by my publisher, Renard Press, the event brought together award-winning British playwright Diane Samuels, celebrated Dutch-Iraqi novelist Rodaan al-Galidi, and Kurdish-Syrian author Haitham Hussein. The discussion was wide-ranging, frank and thought-provoking. You can watch it above.

Calling all book groups

April 12, 2023 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , 10 Comments

Would you like me to come to one of your book group meetings? If so, read on…

Later this month, my second novel, Crossing Over, will be published by Renard Press. Built around an encounter between a Malawian man who arrives on one of the small boats crossing the English Channel and a woman with dementia living on the Kent coast, the book is my attempt to put the humanity back into the story of the so-called migrant crisis.

The subject matter is close to my heart. I’d long wanted to write about Operation Dynamo (the 1940 Little Ships mission that saw ordinary people risking their lives to evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk during World War Two). I found the idea of that crossing very moving, while at the same time suspecting that it had been idealized in the national imagination.

Then, in 2016, I moved to Folkestone on the UK’s south coast and started to hear stories of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. I knew about the crisis in the Mediterranean and had been deeply affected by the BBC’s Exodus documentary series, featuring a number of people making the treacherous journey to Europe.

It was clearly only a matter of time before such crossings became a frequent occurrence closer to home, even as the rhetoric around immigration hardened in the UK parliament and media. What would it be like to write a story that brought together the two kinds of crossings, which held such different statuses in the national discourse?

Crossing Over was the result. Written in an intense nine-month period in 2017, the story sprang to life on the page. It also brought in a lot of the thinking about language, storytelling, and the ways we try and fail to understand each other that I’ve done through this project over the years.

Yet, although I felt it was my best work so far, back in 2017 publishers didn’t think there was a market for the story. It took five years to find a home for it. In that time, I’ve been privileged to work with many asylum seekers in my local area through workshops funded by the Royal Literary Fund and run in collaboration with charities including the Kent Refugee Action Network and Samphire. This has deepened my belief in the importance of using stories to build bridges between people, especially in times of difficulty and division.

So it will be a proud moment when Crossing Over finally comes out in print on 26 April. I have several celebrations planned, but the first of them could involve you. If you think your book group might be interested in reading Crossing Over, please leave a comment below or email ann[at]annmorgan.me by 31 May. All those who do will be entered into a draw and I will attend the winner’s book group discussion of the novel (either in-person or on Zoom).

In the meantime, if you need a bit more information, my publisher, the lovely Renard Press, has put together a handy book group questions guide, which you can find below. This will give you a flavour of the sort of themes the novel involves.

Thank you and good luck!

crossing-over-book-group-questionsDownload

Would you like to do an Incomprehension Workshop?

November 18, 2021 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 42 Comments

When I set out to read a book from every country in a year nearly a decade ago, I realised something alarming. Many of the techniques and assumptions I learned at school and as a student of English literature at university were of limited use in the face of stories from markedly different traditions and cultures. With only 1.87 days to choose, read and blog about each book I featured on this site in 2012, I had no hope of doing the sort of diligent, contextual study that often unlocked the meaning of texts on my degree course. In the face of books built on drastically different ideas of what storytelling should be or imbued with values far removed from my own, I couldn’t rely on my cultural compass to keep me on track.

The only option was to embrace not knowing. I had to make peace with the fact that I wouldn’t understand everything and try to have a meaningful reading experience in spite of this.

This proved to be a revelation. Indeed, far from being a disadvantage, reading with the awareness that I wasn’t going to be able to make sense of everything set me free to have a much more curious, playful and thought-provoking engagement with texts. The more I went on, the more I discovered that paying attention to what I didn’t know could be a strength, teaching me not only about opportunities for further learning but also about my own conditioning, assumptions and blind spots.

As the years went by, I found myself developing a reading technique that centred rather than sidelined incomprehension. The idea of not knowing became a key thread in how I engaged with books of all kinds, as well as in my interactions with other people and things.

It was so transformative that I began to wonder if this technique might be of interest to others. I started talking about it, testing the idea out with a range of different people, and tweaking and developing it in response to their reactions. The encouragement I received led me to think there might be scope for a workshop on this way of reading and I spent a year or so considering the shape this could take.

During this time, my thoughts kept returning to the comprehension exercises I had done at school – those literature-class staples where you have to answer questions about an extract from a book. As I mentioned in a talk I gave on BBC Radio 4 last year, although these exercises help develop many useful skills, they carry the implication that if you can’t explain everything in a piece of writing you’re failing and that there is some single perfect reading of a text that we should be all be striving towards.

Last month, I was thrilled to be allowed to pilot this idea as part of my role as Literary Explorer in Residence at the UK’s Cheltenham Literature Festival, running my Incomprehension Workshop twice on the Huddle stage. There, two groups of around thirty intrepid readers joined me in some literary off-roading, applying my incomprehension techniques to a series of texts likely to be outside the comfort zone of most anglophone readers.

The discussions that ensued were fascinating. It was wonderful to see people letting go of the fear of failing to understand and instead embracing gaps in knowing as a necessary part of the reading process. We covered so much more than we would have done if we had simply set out to explain and make sense of the texts.

Since the pilot, the idea has continued to grow. I’m delighted to have been invited to run the workshop for some sessions with humanities teachers in the UK.

On the subject of which, in celebration of the ten-year anniversary of my life-changing quest to read a book from every country, I’m offering to run one free virtual Incomprehension Workshop for up to 30 participants anywhere in the world in 2022. If you would like to take part, please leave a comment below or drop me a line (ann[at]annmorgan.me) telling me a little bit about you and why you read. 

Conversations with translators: Sarah Ardizzone

September 10, 2021 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

For the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of being an interviewer for the ‘Writers Aloud’ podcast produced by the Royal Literary Fund. This has given me the opportunity to go and record conversations with a range of the fascinating biographers, poets, non-fiction writers, novelists and playwrights who have held RLF fellowships.

The latest interview to be released was particularly special for me: I have wanted to meet Sarah Ardizzone since I read Just Like Tomorrow, her translation of Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain, as my choice for France back in 2012. A translator with an impressive track record of bringing stories outside the mainstream of French literature into English, Ardizzone inspires me with her longstanding commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices and broadening the range of Francophone works available to anglophone readers. (Her translation of Bessora & Barroux’s graphic novel, Alpha: Abidjan to Garde du Nord, a Book of the month of mine back in 2019, is a great example of this.)

Released in two parts, the conversation on the podcast covers a lot of ground. The first episode focuses on the challenge of finding equivalencies for slang and dialect, the lengths Ardizzone went to in bringing Guène’s work into English and the responsibilities that come with working with literature from traditionally marginalised communities. I was particularly interested to hear about the concept of ‘dosage’ – the level of idiomatic language a writer chooses to include in their work – and the loaded significance of the double ‘f’ in Kiffe kiffe demain.

The second part draws on Ardizzone’s experiences studying with the world-renowned French acting movement coach Jacques Lecoq at his eponymous Paris theatre school and explores how performance feeds into her translations. It also touches on how a shift in the way publishers handle markers of difference on the page may reveal a greater acceptance of diversity in storytelling and the ongoing need for challenging those in positions of power to rethink rules.

The timing of the podcasts’ release is serendipitous too: it comes just ahead of the publication by Cassava Republic of Ardizzone’s translation of Faïza Guène’s latest book to come into English, Men Don’t Cry, on October 12, 2021. Judging by Guène and Ardizzone’s past work, it will be a compelling and necessary read.

If you get a chance to read the book or listen to the interview, I’d love to know what you think!

Rethinking translation: The Multilingual London Festival

December 14, 2020 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

From the moment I set myself the goal of reading a book from every country in a year back in late 2011, this project has challenged what I thought I knew. From the question of how many countries there are in the world, to the issue of what makes a book ‘from’ a particular nation, I have repeatedly found myself obliged to question and rethink my assumptions.

Apparently clear distinctions break down when you view them through a global lens. Factual writing blurs with fiction; genre boundaries warp and snap. Even the notions of what storytelling is for and what counts as a book prove flimsy and unreliable in the face of traditions and publishing processes that operate differently to those we are used to in the anglophone world.

A few weeks ago, another distinction that I had imagined was clear-cut crumbled before my eyes. I have long held great admiration for translators. In my book, Reading the World, after considering the many images often used to try to encapsulate what practitioners do when they move a story from one language to another, I reached the conclusion that reading a translation was akin to borrowing another person’s eyes. That person, I felt, should be credited as co-creator of the work – something that the #namethetranslator campaign has done a lot to encourage. Still, it had never occurred to me to question whether the boundary between translated and non-translated might itself be permeable.

That changed when I attended the Multilingual London Festival, a collaboration between SOAS University of London and the Museum of London and part of the ‘Multilingual locals, significant geographies: a new approach to world literature’ project. Celebrating the fact that the UK capital is home to more than 300 languages, the online event featured conversations between multilingual, London-based writers such as Aida Eidemariam, Selma Dabbagh and Aamer Hussein, as well as readings in a range of tongues from poets including Caasha Luul Mohamud, Nada Menzalji and Jennifer Wong.

Speaking to a shifting gallery of Zoom audience members (who numbered around 80 at any given time during the two hours I was logged on), the speakers in the first session shared insights into their process and the way their multilingualism had informed, challenged and enriched their writing. ‘Language is always a political issue,’ said Shazaf Fatima Haider, describing how her novel, How it Happened, became a place to lay to rest the tension she’d experienced between Urdu and English growing up in Pakistan.

Using the textures of spoken Urdu, she had embarked on a process of ‘Urduisation’ of English that helped her to reconcile the languages and the power imbalance they represented. Nevertheless, this fusion was not without its critics – ‘you’ve destroyed English,’ one relative told her when he read the book.

In response, Ethiopian-Canadian Eidemariam talked us through the labyrinth she had to negotiate in order to plait together Amharic and English in her award-winning memoir about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History. It was, she explained, a process of challenging her own assumptions and looking for resonances between the two traditions – a process in which the linguistic cultures’ shared biblical roots proved invaluable. Often, things turned out to have rather different meanings than their surface translations might suggest. The Amharic term that translates literally as ‘breast mother’, for example, signifies a patron rather than a maternal figure – something that caused a degree of confusion in the research process.

Both writers had to decide the level of Amharic and Urdu that a non-speaker could cope with in the nominally English text. With some publishers being rather conservative about the level of foreignness they believe readers will tolerate, this was not easy. In the end, however, they arrived at similar conclusions. Although she accepted having a glossary, Eidemariam decided to ‘push back against the need to explain’ and trust the context of the story to supply the understanding readers needed. Shafaz, meanwhile, took the decision to ‘write for the people in the know’ because ‘they are the ones who will notice’.

I found these insights particularly illuminating, as they chimed with certain decisions I’d been making about technical language in what I hope will be my next novel. While the terms I was working with were not from a foreign language, they were nevertheless from a linguistic sphere that may be unfamiliar to many general readers. Like Eidemariam and Shafaz, I had opted to write for those in the know, trusting the context to supply the sense.

On that basis, although I was moving between registers and they were moving between languages, we three writers were doing similar kinds of work – using language to bridge gaps and translate experience between different groups of people. Perhaps instead of being a binary concept, translation (much like memoir and fiction) was more of a sliding scale, moving from books in their original languages, through books infused with the rhythms and terms of other worlds and tongues, then works in fusion languages such as Spanglish and Hinglish, to volumes in which the words were written by someone other than the original author in order to make them intelligible to a fresh audience.

Once again, the concepts I thought I understood were shifting and remaking themselves before my eyes. After nearly nine years of international literary exploration, I still had so much to learn.

Picture: ‘London 11-08-2012‘ by Karen Roe on flickr.com

World kid lit month

September 7, 2020 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

I often get messages from parents and teachers asking for suggestions of translated books for younger readers. As my original reading the world quest and subsequent eight years of international literary exploration have focused almost entirely on adult books (with Dominica, Samoa and one of my Chinese books of the month being rare exceptions), I can rarely do more than point people in the direction of a few useful websites and resources.

However, there are plenty of adventurous readers with lots to say on this subject, as I discovered earlier this summer when I tweeted asking for details of translated books I could buy my daughter for her third birthday. A lot of excellent recommendations flooded in, chief among them, a thread of suggestions from translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. Ruth is co-editor of the World Kid Lit blog. Check it out for lots of great recommendations and ways you can get involved, including #WorldKidLitMonth, which takes place every September (and was founded by Marcia Lynx Qualey, Alexandra Büchler and Lawrence Schimel).*

My daughter and I have had great fun trying out many of the suggestions and so, in celebration of this year’s #WorldKidLitMonth, I wanted to share three titles that have become firm favourites in our house.

Valdemar’s Peas

This was a hit from the moment it dropped onto the doormat. ‘Again!’ came the call after the first reading. ‘Again!’ was the command after the second. And so on. It’s easy to see why: centring on a battle over eating vegetables and sibling rivalry, this wittily illustrated story is instantly relatable for toddlers. Unlike many comparable English-language titles, however, this one resists the temptation to take a preachy tone and drive towards an ending in which Valdemar learns why it is important to eat peas. Instead, there is a lovely irreverence to the way the story plays out that allows both reader and listener to revel in naughtiness. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it seems to have increased my daughter’s interest in peas. ‘I’m having peas like Valdemar!’ she told me a few days after the book arrived, cheerfully scooping handfuls into her mouth.

Valdemar’s Peas by Maria Jönsson, translated from the Swedish by Julia Marshall (Gecko Press, 2018)

Oscar Seeks a Friend

This book puts a fresh spin on a common theme in books for little people: the quest for someone to play with. This time, the character in need of companionship is a skeleton thrown into a panic when one of his teeth falls out, disfiguring him for good. When he tries to bargain with a little girl who has just lost one of her milk teeth, a surprising and rather touching adventure ensues. Author-illustrator Paweł Pawlak’s collage-like illustrations absolutely make this book, with comedy, curiosity and talking points on every page (ever wondered what a skeleton would look like riding a penny-farthing?).

Oscar Seeks a Friend by Paweł Pawlak, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Lantana Publishing, 2019)

My Pictures After the Storm

It’s often said that humour is one of the hardest things to translate. Yet this doesn’t seem to have been a problem for translator Daniel Hahn with this wonderful picture-story book. A lot of the comedy is in the illustrations (which include witty before-and-after depictions of lunch, the arrival of a baby sister and a swimming trip), but there is some sparkling word-play too, which means this book offers something for readers of a wide range of linguistic capability to enjoy. As with Valdemar’s Peas, there is a lovely irreverence to a lot of the sections (witness the boiled spinach – the only item left untouched after lunch). It’s also a great one for aspiring readers to spend time looking through on their own.

My Pictures After the Storm by Éric Veillé, translated from the French by Daniel Hahn (Gecko Press, 2017)

* Changed to give the correct names of the founders of #Worldkidlitmonth.

A library visit

January 15, 2020 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

Libraries have been going through a tough time in the UK in recent years. In the last decade, more than 700 have closed, with scores of others under threat because of funding cuts. As I write, a high-profile, author-led campaign is under way to fight plans to shut 14 libraries in Hampshire, the county in which Jane Austen was born and lived for most of her life.

Many people have written much more eloquently than I could about why places where people can gather to access books for free are vital. Their role in stretching the human imagination and changing lives is a recurring theme in stories around the planet. From Roald Dahl’s Matilda to Tayeb Salih’s Mustafa Sa’eed, literature abounds with characters shaped by hours spent in public spaces lined with books.

However, this week, I got a powerful, practical reminder of why these places matter when I took up an invitation to speak to Sandgate library book club.

The only library in Kent to be managed by a parish council on behalf of the county council, Sandgate library sits a street away from the English Channel on the UK’s south coast. It is run by a mixture of paid staff and volunteers who make it possible to offer longer opening hours and a regular programme of events.

Chief among the volunteers is retired teacher Liz, who I know from the regular Read and Rhyme sessions my daughter and I have attended. Liz also runs the book club and, when she discovered I was a writer, she very kindly put my novel Beside Myself on the schedule and invited me along some months later to talk to the group.

I arrived a little early to find the members – all women and most retired – engaged in a lively discussion of their latest read, which the librarian had ordered in from libraries across the county to ensure that everyone had a copy.

Each took it in turns to share her assessment, finishing with a mark out of ten that averaged out to around 5. (I resisted the temptation to ask what Beside Myself had scored when it was up for discussion some months before.)

The comments were refreshingly frank. Although the novel under examination was by a celebrated household name, the members – quite rightly – had no compunction in calling out passages that had bored, irritated or baffled them, alongside sharing the aspects they had enjoyed.

After this, it was my turn. Following an introduction from Liz, I launched into an informal talk about my year of reading the world and novel writing, answering questions as they arose. The discussion was warm and friendly. We covered some familiar ground, including several of the topics listed in the FAQs on this site, as well as some more unusual queries to do with the writing process – I don’t think I’ve ever been asked how to turn a school essay into a novel before!

The hour was up in no time. Before I knew it, a get-well-soon card for an absent member was circulating for people to sign, and we were shrugging on our coats and saying our goodbyes.

What lasted much longer – and will no doubt outlive the beautiful bunch of flowers the book club gave me as a thank you for my visit – was the sense of welcome that surrounded the library. A thriving centre for friendship, shared interests and fun in this little village on the edge of the land. A precious community built around books.

Literary adventures in Amsterdam

May 23, 2019 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

This week saw me heading to Amsterdam. I went there at the invitation of international bestselling Belgian author Annelies Verbeke. She has been the writer in residence, or Vrije Schrijver, at VU University this year and her final duty in the role was to organise and deliver the Abraham Kuyper Lezing, an annual public lecture built around a theme of the curator’s choosing.

This year’s title was De taal van de wereld (The language of the world). As part of this, Verbeke was keen for me to speak about my journey through international literature.

It was a great pleasure to be back in Amsterdam. It’s a city very close to my heart: I went there to decompress after I finished my year of reading the world back in January 2013 and the main character of my first novel Beside Myself spends her happiest time there. I caught myself half-wondering if I might bump into her in Vondelpark.

The visit was also a lovely opportunity to catch up with writer friend Gaston Dorren. Dorren and I have stayed in touch since we shared a stage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival back in 2015.

My visit coincided with a special day for him: his latest book, Babel: Around the World in 20 Languages, had just come out in his mother tongue, Dutch. When we met for lunch, he had just picked up his copy from his publisher. As you can see, from the photo, however, he was very self-effacing about this achievement.

After a stroll around Amsterdam’s picturesque centre, I met Annelies Verbeke for ginger ale and hot chocolate in a café near to the Zuiderkerk, where the evening event would take place. I was intrigued to hear about her work at VU, which, among other things, has involved gathering volunteer translations of short stories from around the world.

I was also thrilled to discover that Verbeke has been inspired to mount her own international literary quest and has so far read books from 75 countries. We talked enthusiastically about some of the many questions around cultural identity and authenticity that such armchair travels uncover, and I picked her brain for recommendations.

The evening event was an extravaganza. Bringing together performances from intercultural women’s choir Mihira (a group made up of singers from some 20 countries who each contribute music from their cultural tradition to the repertoire), actor Kenneth Herdigein and Friesian poet Tsead Bruinja with talks from Verbeke and several of the university staff, it offered the 200 or so audience members a smorgasbord of cultural delights.

As one of the major themes was the challenge of combatting the spread of English in Dutch culture, I felt rather sheepish when it was my turn to take the stage (my Dutch, I’m afraid, is not equal to delivering a presentation and I was obliged to stick to my mother tongue). Everyone was extremely gracious and welcoming, however, and the staged discussion Verbeke and I had with fellow author and host Abdelkader Benali was fascinating.

Over a drink afterwards, I asked Benali more about his work. Although we English speakers only have access to his first novel, Wedding by the Sea, the Moroccan-Dutch writer is prolific, particularly as a theatre-maker. His explanation of the process he goes through to develop shows and the emotional investment that each of the performances requires was wonderful.

I left the Zuiderkerk impressed once more by the richness that the world’s storytellers have to offer – and how much we English speakers often miss.