Tag Archives: literary award

Sherborne Travel Writing Festival

April 22, 2025 By in Events, Literature festivals, My books Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’m not a travel writer. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. This year, however, I do seem to be spending quite a lot of time speaking, writing and thinking about travel. Not only am I preparing to cover the literary trip of a lifetime for a national newspaper later this summer (watch this space), but I’ve also taken the stage at two travel writing festivals.

The second of these was the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, which took place earlier this month. Now in its third year, the three-day event in Dorset, UK, is the brainchild of Rory MacLean, who is celebrated for writing genre-busting books about moving across and beyond national borders. His debut, Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe, was published in 1992 and is still startlingly relevant (and very funny) today.

Much like MacLean’s work, the festival celebrates travel writing in the broadest sense. The traditional formula of the white European reporting on how he finds remote corners of the globe was not much in evidence in this year’s line up. Instead, the programme included an extraordinary range of speakers, from the brilliant Nandini Das, who held the audience captive with a talk on Britain’s first bungling attempts to forge diplomatic relations with the Mughal Empire, to Kapka Kassabova, who spoke movingly of the three months she spent living with Europe’s last moving pastoralists in the mountains of her native Bulgaria while researching her latest book Anima.

I was privileged to take the stage twice. I started off in the interviewee’s chair, spending a wonderful hour talking about Reading the World with journalist and fellow translation champion Rosie Goldsmith (you can see us pictured above). Ten years on from the launch of the first edition of that book, it was a pleasure to reflect back on the journey so far and look forward to the publication of Relearning to Read this September. Goldsmith is one of the best in the business when it comes to chairing literary discussions. If you’re a fan of book podcasts, the Slightly Foxed Podcast, which she hosts, is well worth a listen.

Then it was my turn to ask the questions. I was joined on stage by Xiaolu Guo, who I had the privilege of chairing at Cheltenham Literature Festival last year. An artist who has travelled in many senses (across the world, between languages, between media, through books and across numerous periods of literary history), Guo is a fascinating writer and speaker. We focused on her memoir, My Battle of Hastings, which draws on a year she spent living in the British seaside town of Hastings, where William the Conqueror routed the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. But it was also great to touch on her new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, a feminist retelling of Moby Dick.

Offstage, there were many similarly fascinating discussions. It was a joy to meet many enthusiastic readers and writers, and a testament to the warm welcome Rory MacLean and his team offer that so many authors from the first two editions of the festival were also in attendance. The weekend was crowned by the announcement of a new annual travel writing prize attached to the festival, the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, which will be awarded for the first time next year to a published British or European author whose work encourages understanding between peoples and across societies. Given the breadth and creativity of the team’s vision of travel writing, it’s exciting to think of what this new award might do to broaden the field. And I wonder if in future years the organisers might be persuaded to expand the remit even further to include works published in English from all over the world.

In my experience, there are two kinds of literary festival – those that capitalise on culture and those that nurture it. Sherborne Travel Writing Festival is firmly in the second camp. I left fizzing with ideas and thrilled by new connections. It will be exciting to see where the festival takes us next.

Picture: courtesy of Rosie Goldsmith.

Book of the month: Tiphaine Rivière

February 28, 2018 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

In my previous post on book clubs, I mentioned that international literary prizes can often be a good source of reading suggestions. February’s Book of the month is a neat demonstration of that. Indeed, in this case a literary award encouraged me to discover not just an author I’d never read before, but a whole new genre.

Francesca Barrie’s translation of Tiphaine Rivière’s Carnets de thèse (Notes on a Thesis to you and me) is one of six books on the inaugural shortlist of the TA First Translation Prize. Set up and endowed by writer, editor and translator Daniel Hahn, the annual award recognises outstanding debut translations published in the UK, with the first winner announced tomorrow (March 1).

The award is unusual in that, unlike most comparable honours, the original author of the book does not receive part of the prize money. Instead, the  credit goes entirely to the person who rewrote their words in English.

The presence of Notes on a Thesis on the shortlist marks the award out in another way too. It is rare to see a graphic novel in contention for a prize like this. Although the art form is taken very seriously in many parts of the globe, books that use pictures to tell stories tend not to get much attention from the English-speaking literary establishment. As a result, they don’t come onto the radars of many anglophone readers.

This was certainly true for me. Being a wordy person with relatively poor visual sense, I’ve never really ventured into the genre. Had it not been for the presence of Notes on a Thesis on the TAFTP shortlist, the work would almost certainly have passed me by.

However, when I looked it up, the premise struck me as irresistible. Told through the eyes of a young woman, Jeanne, who gets accepted to do a PhD in Paris, the book sets out to satirise the university system. Sparked off by a blog Rivière started after three years working on a thesis herself, it is, according to the blurb on the back, ‘a wickedly funny graphic novel about academic life, for anyone who’s ever missed a deadline.’

I snapped up a copy and took it with me to the University of Kent, where, in between seeing students (many of them working on PhDs) in my capacity as a Royal Literary Fund fellow, I quickly fell under the spell of Rivière’s craft.

‘Wickedly funny’ does not begin to cover it. This is a book that will have readers laughing out loud and rushing to share the jokes. The observations are precise and devastating. A range of killer characters comes to life in a handful of sentences – from the secretary with ‘a secret tactic: feigning gross incompetence to wear down her adversaries, until they eventually stop asking her to do anything at all’ to the PhD supervisor who prescribes reading the complete works of Schopenhauer as a way of getting rid of his charge.

One of the great joys of the book is the way Rivière’s illustrations not only portray but also advance the story. Take this series of ID card snapshots revealing the toll Jeanne’s thesis takes on her over the course of four years.

Or this spread capturing the experience of giving a paper and then waiting nervously for questions at the end.

The publisher’s decision to market Notes on a Thesis at the academic community is understandable, but people from all walks of life will find much to recognise and chuckle at here. Whether it’s the excruciating family Christmas where well-meaning relatives unwittingly rip apart your ambitions, or the irrational, middle-of-the-night heart-to-heart with the partner who has been forced to ride the roller-coaster of your dreams with you, the pages brim with telling and hilarious details.

Although books about writing are common, it is unusual to see the business of trying to put pen to paper captured in pictures. Notes on a Thesis is both a joy and a surprise, richly deserving of literary recognition even as it pokes fun at much of the paraphernalia associated with that world.

If this is an example of what graphic novels have to offer, I have got a lot to learn.

Notes on a Thesis (Carnets de thèse) by Tiphaine Rivière, translated from the French by Francesca Barrie (Jonathan Cape, 2016)