Tag Archives: literature

Free incomprehension workshop taster

December 17, 2025 By in Events, My books Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Good news! If you’ve been wanting to try my incomprehension workshop, your chance has come! I’ll be offering a virtual taster session and chatting to super reader, blogger and all-round translation champion Marina Sofia at 7.30pm (UK time) on Tuesday 20 January 2026.

Over the past few years I’ve run the workshop with readers of all ages from 10 upwards around the world, most recently for the fourth time at the Cheltenham Literature Festival (pictured above). The sessions are usually ticketed or run in-house for organisations, so this is a rare opportunity to try it from the comfort of your own home for free.

If you haven’t heard of the incomprehension workshop, it’s the basis of my new book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-knowing. Prompted by the realisation that no-one can be an expert on all the world’s stories, it invites readers to play with how paying attention to what we don’t understand can help us read ourselves and our world better.

Playful, disruptive, warm and inclusive, this hour-long free event is for curious readers everywhere. Simply register here to join us: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/mvu2Yq8uRdCOZCinIaj_kA

What is the future of English studies?

July 7, 2025 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 17 Comments

Last Thursday, I had the unusual experience of giving a paper at an academic conference. The event was about the future of English studies, and I was there because of a call for papers put out in association with Wasafiri magazine, a British publication championing international contemporary writing. I suggested that I might speak about my work with embracing not-knowing in reading, which forms the basis of my Incomprehension Workshops and forthcoming book, Relearning to Read. The organisers liked the sound of this, and so, last Thursday morning, I found myself joining other speakers and delegates in the gracious surroundings of York’s Guildhall for the start of the three-day event.

The University of York’s Professor Helen Smith opened proceedings, saying that she felt the event was about survival and finding positive ways that the field of English studies could continue. As an English literature graduate myself, I was a bit taken aback – surely the subject couldn’t be in so much trouble?

But as the discussion opened up and academics from universities across the UK began to speak, it became clear that there are many challenges facing those teaching English literature, language and related disciplines today. From the declaration last year that the English GCSE isn’t fit for purpose and the increased testing of performance all through school, to the encroachment of AI on students’ work practices, the sector seems increasingly restricted and hobbled.

The main issue, as several of the people sitting near me said, was a lack of joy in the classroom these days.

This made me sad. For me, reading has always been about joy. I was eight when I decided that I wanted to study English literature at university, having been entranced by L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Reading was magic, it seemed to me. I couldn’t imagine a better thing than spending three years reading stories. How miserable to think of today’s young readers having all that pleasure squashed out of them.

Still, when I thought about it, I could recognise what was being said. Last year, I ran an Incomprehension Workshop at a sixth-form college near where I live in Folkestone. It being World Book Day, I started the session by asking participants to write down how they would complete three sentences:

  • Reading is…
  • The world is…
  • Stories are…

At the end of the session, I invited students to read out what they’d written. One said this:

  • Reading is boring
  • The world is crazy
  • Stories are exciting

It was clear that something of that disconnect the university lecturers were describing had happened for that sixth-former. Although they still felt the power of stories, this had somehow become separated from reading for them. Books were not the source of connection and electricity they had been for me.

I hope my panel helped propose some ways in which that gap might be rebridged. Titled, ‘Incomprehension and Living Between’, it opened with Turkish writer and translator Elif Gülez reading from her memoir about the culture clash she experienced growing up. The extract was powerful and resonated with the small but highly engaged audience, showing how personal narrative can cut through barriers and make experience live in other minds.

Then, I spoke about incomprehension and how I try to foster a spirit of play in my work with this. I was particularly touched when one audience member said afterwards that the demonstration I had given had taken her back to the wonder of reading like a child once more.

Lastly, we were joined remotely by Indian academic Gokul Prabhu, who delivered a fascinating paper on ‘Queer Opacity in Translation’ – considering how the attempt to make things legible and understandable may sometimes work against the spirit of a text, and how translators may sometimes need to leave gaps and jolts in work that does not intend to make its meaning plain.

There was a marvellous electricity in the room, and this carried on into the afternoon, in a session on teaching creative writing, chaired by poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, whose work-in-progress memoir I read as my Trinidadian pick back in 2012. The panel featured four writers who all teach at UK universities: J.R. Carpenter (University of Leeds), Joanne Limburg (University of Cambridge), Juliana Mensah (University of York), and Sam Reese (York St John University).

They were honest about the challenges facing the industry and sector, but so full of enthusiasm and powerful insights that it was impossible not to be encouraged. I was particularly struck by Carpenter’s statement that a poem ought to unfold in the same way that it was gathered up, although, as Mensah observed, this idea is faintly terrifying when I think about the chaotic nature of my own creative process!

I came away heartened to think that the academic branch of the field I love has such people working in it. And grateful that so many of those labouring under such pressure at the UK’s universities felt it was worth taking three days out of their hectic schedules to consider how better to foster and share a love of reading stories.

I also felt a renewed energy for and commitment to the possibilities of embracing not-knowing and incomprehension too. More soon!

Picture: ‘Municipal Offices and Guildhall, York, North Riding of Yorkshire, England’ by Billy Wilson on flickr.com

Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival 2025

February 13, 2025 By in Literature festivals, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Last week, I got to chair my dream literary festival event panel. It featured Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie (my Togolese pick for my original year of reading the world), Bhutanese author and publisher Kunzang Choden (whose The Circle of Karma I also read in 2012), and Bissau-Guinean writer, publisher and engineer Abdulai Silá, whose The Ultimate Tragedy, translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, was a book of the month of mine a while back.

Not only that, but the event took place in Assam, north-east India, at one of the liveliest and most inspiring gatherings of writers it has ever been my privilege to attend.

This was my second visit to Dibrugarh. The first took place in March 2024, when I was one of the cohort of writers from around the world invited to take part in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. That event was such a success that the university committed to host a further two editions of the festival. The first of these took place last week.

This time, my involvement in the festival was bigger. Not only was I present as a speaker, but I played a small role in suggesting and inviting some of the other authors in the months leading up to the event. As such, I had the joy of seeing a number of writers whose work I have long admired take the stage in Dibrugarh. They included the Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren, who I met when our debut books came out in 2015; Northern Irish short story writer, novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell, who I’ve known since we were aspiring authors in our teens; and Uzbek novelist and journalist Hamid Ismailov, who I had the great pleasure of interviewing for my first book, Reading the World.

In addition, the festival brought a number of other intriguing writers onto my radar. With a focus on Africa, the programme included Cameroonian novelist Ernis, Congolese-Norwegian poet and novelist Raïs Neza Boneza and award-winner Joaquim Arena from Cabo Verde.

I chaired several panels with South African writer Shubnum Khan. Her work has only recently become available in the UK, in the form of her engrossing second novel, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, but I was also delighted to have the opportunity to read her essay collection How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo in preparation for our discussion. Funny and illuminating, the book sheds light on the challenges of moving through the world as a Muslim woman. It would appeal to fans of Nanjala Nyabola’s Travelling While Black and ought to be more widely available. UK and US publishers, I’m looking at you.

Having one or two authors from around 20 nations present, alongside a host of wonderful Indian writers, made for an unusually level playing field when it came to discussing international issues. It was powerful to hear perspectives on questions such as the legacy of colonialism and the realities of migration from such a wide range of people and places. I think all of us had our eyes opened over the course of the festival.

The fact that these conversations were so inspiring and frank was also down to the ambience the university and the festival team created. The welcome in Assam is always warm, but this time the organisers went the extra mile. From the student volunteers who showed us around and the banners with author photos lining the campus roads to the delicious food and the world-class Dibrugarh University folk orchestra that played at the closing ceremony, the guests felt celebrated at every turn.

The same held true outside the university. When a group of us ventured out into town, bookshop owner Pradyut Hazarika invited us all for chai. The shop was one of eight branches of Banalata employing 200 staff across Assam, he explained, and the business not only sells but also publishes the Assamese titles it displays. This makes for a personal touch that is often missing in the book industry in other parts of the world.

The personal touch is also at the heart of DUILF. ‘Having established contact with you, you are now close to us in more ways than one and we shall make every effort to make you feel at home,’ wrote curator Rahul Jain in his welcome note to authors.

As we all left Dibrugarh to return to our lives around the world, dispersed like seeds from a pod as Lucy Caldwell put it, I for one certainly felt I was leaving a home from home.

Dublin Book Festival

November 11, 2024 By in Events, Post-world, Reading the World (book) Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

Last weekend, I had the privilege of being part of the line-up at Dublin Book Festival, an annual celebration of all things literary in Ireland’s capital. My event was a discussion of reading the world with Literature Ireland director Sinéad Mac Aodha (pictured with me above), who helped launch Crossing Over at Hodges Figgis last year. But I was lucky to attend several other things thanks to the Literature Ireland team, who took me under their wing for the weekend.

The first of these was the launch of Your Own Dark Shadow: A Selection of Lost Irish Horror Stories at the Gutter Bookshop.

I don’t consider myself a horror fan, but I was intrigued by what editor Jack Fennell said in his speech about how horror is a way of articulating the sense that something is wrong in the world and helping people to feel less alone in this. My fiction bears hallmarks of this, so I am intrigued to see how this plays out in the collection.

I was also deeply impressed by the ethos of the collection’s publisher, Tramp Press, one of a number of indie houses making strides in Ireland. Their submission window is open now, so if you live outside North America and are looking for somewhere to place work, I would recommend checking them out.

The next day I attended an event on short stories with Jan Carson and Mary Costello (pictured above). In the queue outside I was delighted to bump into debut novelist Alan Murrin, with whom I did an event earlier this year. His recommendation of Mary Costello’s story ‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ was so enthusiastic that I lost no time in buying a copy of her latest collection.

The discussion in the event was illuminating and wide-ranging. Jan Carson talked about how word counts were coming down for many journals and competitions. ‘Watch yourself if you’re always writing to fit others’ requirements,’ she said. She explained that the way into stories for her is through concepts, and gave a brilliant example in the shape a story in her latest collection that was commissioned to explore how Northern Ireland is seen in the wake of Brexit. She had approached the subject by envisaging a baby drifting down a river separating the land of two farmer brothers who don’t get on.

Meanwhile, Mary Costello said that for her the spur to writing comes from thinking about the interior lives of her characters. It will often be physical exercise, whether walking or hoovering, that shakes problems loose in her work.

Next up was an event on the essay, chaired by Brendan Barrington, founder editor of The Dublin Review. I found this very inspiring. Over the hour-long discussion, in which panellists shared some of their favourite pieces from the publication, I was struck by the enthusiasm of these writers for this somewhat enigmatic form, and by their openness to people writing in several genres. ‘If you’re a serious writer and you don’t write an essay occasionally, you’re missing a trick,’ said Barrington at one point. I took this as a challenge. Watch this space.

My event was towards the end of the afternoon and it was wonderful to be greeted by an enthusiastic audience, featuring several familiar faces, among them author Rónán Hession, Africa Institute in Ireland programme director Adekunle Gomez and Lyndsey Fineran, who created my literary explorer role at Cheltenham Literature Festival and is now artistic director of the Auckland Writers Festival.

The discussions afterwards were particularly heartwarming. So many readers shared insights about how reading internationally connected to their experience, and I left with a list of book recommendations. I was also particularly delighted to make the acquaintance of translator Signe Lyng, who brings many of Ireland’s most well-known writers’ work into Danish. She subsequently sent me a list of Danish recommendations. I think I feel a book of the month coming on…

I left Dublin inspired and encouraged. What I’d shared in was an event founded on the belief that storytelling is valuable, not for the money it makes but because of the connections it forges – something that I hope also drives my work.

Irish writing has always had an important place on the international stage, and is perhaps enjoying a particularly powerful moment. At Dublin Book Festival, it was not hard to see why.

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.

Book of the month: Leïla Slimani

December 20, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of books about books. Specifically, books about reading, writing and translating. This is partly because I find these kinds of books fascinating but also because my next book is going to be about rethinking the way we read. More details to follow soon…

So it was a joy to hear from academic, translator and champion of women in translation Helen Vassallo (if you haven’t yet come across her Translating Women site, it is a treasure trove of insightful commentary and exciting titles) about a new collection of work by French-Moroccan literary superstar Leïla Slimani that she had just brought into English. And an even greater joy when she kindly sent me a copy.

Unlike the novels that made Slimani’s name (chief among them Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny, as it was variously translated into English, which won the Prix Goncourt and became France’s most-read book of 2016) The Devil Is in the Detail brings together three slender works released separately in French. It is the first in a series published by Liverpool University Press with Florida State University’s Winthrop-King Institute that aims to showcase ‘cutting-edge contemporary French-language fiction, travel writing, essays and other prose works’ that ‘reflect the diversity, dynamism, originality, and relevance of new and recent writing in French’.

Certainly, the collection features a diverse range of prose. Short stories rub shoulders with essays. There’s the transcript of a staged conversation Slimani had with newspaper director and writer Éric Fottorino. And the volume ends with an urgent piece in praise of politician and women’s rights champion Simone Veil, followed by a selection of quotations from her. It is the sort of amalgam that marketing bods at mainstream anglophone publishing houses would veto in a heartbeat.

Thank goodness, then, for indies and university presses. Because the curation of these superficially dissimilar pieces reveals striking threads running through Slimani’s thinking and creative practice.

Take her views on reading’s relationship to feminism. For women, as she explains in On Writing, her interview with Fottorino, time with books is essential because ‘a woman who reads is a woman who is emancipating herself’. With this in mind, she echoes Virginia Woolf’s call for a room of one’s own, claiming that this is important to allow space for reading as much as for writing.

This idea of the part reading plays in shaping women’s agency is demonstrated in the short story ‘Elsewhere’. Protagonist Rim finds books hold the key to her freedom. Her father ‘gorged her with stories’, giving her the world in printed form so that in the end she is confident enough to go out and meet it on her own terms.

Slimani’s reflections on her writing are particularly fascinating. Unabashed about discussing her own struggles – from an abandoned project to inhabit the minds of the Charlie Hebdo attackers to an unpublished first novel – she is disarmingly honest about the effort it requires: ‘There probably are such people, born writers destined for greatness, but I think there are a lot of people who just need to work hard, to meet the right person at the right time or need inspiration to strike at the right moment.’

Such frankness feels unfamiliar coming from such a lauded writer. In the English-speaking world, the fiction of the overnight success still has a powerful hold over the way we talk about books. (‘Ssh, don’t tell people that,’ a PR person muttered to a novelist friend of mine when they mentioned they had six failed manuscripts in their bottom drawer.)

But then, Slimani has always been a writer to challenge convention. Whether she’s penning gripping thrillers that win the highest literary honours (admittedly not such a departure in the Francophone world, where crime fiction more often receives critical acclaim), or exposing the hypocrisy underpinning the treatment of Moroccan women, she is unapologetic in her views, even when this risks controversy. Refusing to allow ‘a pseudo-respect for other cultures’ to muzzle her, she calls out injustice where she sees it.

Yet this forthrightness rests on a belief in the importance of togetherness and the joy of sharing space with those who think differently. The short piece ‘Our Gods and Our Homelands’ ends with an appeal for the France of 2016 to mirror the big Christmas meals Slimani remembers enjoying in Morocco as a child:

‘where everyone was welcome, where no one judged either the drunkenness of some or the outspokenness of others. Where the older generation did not dismiss the things the younger ones cared about, where everyone present chuckled at the blasphemers. Where at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was the awareness of how lucky we were to be together in a world where everything is hell-bent on dividing us.’

As we move into 2024, may our world take on more of the spirit of Slimani’s childhood Christmases. And may our reading, like this collection, be wide-ranging, ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging, engrossing and inspiring.

Thanks to everyone who continues to follow this blog, and whose comments, messages and suggestions keep fuelling and expanding my reading and writing adventures. Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a joyful New Year.

The Devil Is in the Detail and other writings by Leïla Slimani, translated from the French by Helen Vassallo (Liverpool University Press, 2023)

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. 

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.

Book of the month: Shehan Karunatilaka

February 26, 2019 By in Asia, Book of the month Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, Mohammed left a comment on this site: ‘Ann after these long years did you finish reading all the list?’

He was referring to the lengthy collection of alternative recommendations I received for many countries during and shortly after my 2012 quest to read a book from every country. Although I made one choice for each UN-recognised nation that year, I recorded all the valid suggestions I received on The List so that I – and anyone else who was interested – could refer to them. At the time, I think I did intend to work my way through them all eventually and I have cherry-picked a number of titles in the six years since the end of the original project.

However, I have also found myself tempted away by numerous other intriguing books (many of which have been published since my list was drawn up).

That’s the thing with reading. One book leads to the next. You plunge into a story about a woman’s struggle to relocate to Johannesburg and find that leads you on to an intriguing memoir about growing up under Apartheid. This piques your interest in literature written and spoken in South Africa’s ten other official languages, which in turn leads you to discover a trend for sunshine-noir crime writing. Before you know it, a month has passed and you’re still nowhere near to exhausting the leads that sprouted from that original book.

Small wonder, then, that many of those suggestions I received in 2012 are still waiting their turn.

Sometimes, however, a title on The List gets impatient and seems to reach out from my computer screen to grab me and demand my attention. This happened to me most recently with Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman.

The novel had been a strong contender for my Sri Lankan choice back in 2012. I had heard very good things about it – not least that it had won several awards, including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Commonwealth Book Prize.

There were two sticking points, however. The novel had been written in English (and after my enlightening exchange with Indian journalist Suneetha Balakrishnan I was making a concerted effort to read more translated books) and it was about cricket, of which, I have to confess, I am not a fan. As a result, I jumped another way, picking Sunethra Rajakarunanayake’s Metta as my Sri Lankan choice.

That might have been it for Chinaman. But then, earlier this month, I was invited to take part in several events at the Brahmaputra Literary Festival in Assam. Among the sessions on my schedule was a panel discussion with Shehan Karunatilaka. Clearly, it was time I read his book.

Centred around WG Karunasena, an aging alcoholic journalist trying to track down the elusive Pradeep Mathew – the greatest Sri Lankan spin bowler you’ve never heard of – the novel takes readers into the heart of the nation’s most popular sport. It is, unashamedly, a book about cricket, but, like the best sports writing, it also explores many other things – fanaticism, history, politics, love and hate. What’s more, it makes a bold claim, a ‘Sales Pitch’ appearing in the opening pages:

‘If you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you.’

Karunatilaka delivers on this promise. He does so by inhabiting his characters’ obsessions – a perspective he says he gained by spending many hours hanging around bars with old, drunk cricket fanatics – so completely that we live and breathe them too. Deftly working in the necessary explanations of cricket’s mechanics alongside numerous quirky facts and pieces of trivia (how test matches came to last five days and the surprising identities of the first teams to play an international game, for example), he opens up a world and invites us in.

The whole thing is achieved with wonderful playfulness. From word-play and witty one-liners through to amusing sleights of hand in the plotting and even jokes at the author’s expense (by the end of the narrative characters have not only criticised the novel as being ‘rubbish’ in places, but also dismissed Karunatilaka’s name as ‘common’), the book sparkles with good humour.

Indeed, it is so enjoyable that it is easy to overlook the virtuosic leaps Karunatilaka makes to propel us between its numerous storylines. It is testament to his ability to draw characters in a line or two that, many times, we find ourselves picking up a thread that was left dangling tens of pages before without hesitation.

Anglophone readers tend to think of humorous books as being towards the lighter end of the spectrum, but Chinaman challenges this assumption. From racism and the violence and injustice that has marked Sri Lanka’s history through to the personal tragedy of being unable to connect with those we love, Karunatilaka presents us with a broad range of human experience and makes us feel its weight.

The result is a reading adventure as gripping and memorable as attending a brilliant test match must be for a cricket fanatic. I marvelled at the technical ingenuity, gasped at the surprises and moments of drama, chuckled at the back and forth between the players and the umpire, and luxuriated in the ability to be taken out of myself by something truly fascinating for a few days. It is a wonderful, joyous book… and a strong argument for digging out a few more of those recommendations from that there list.

Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka (Jonathan Cape, 2011)

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Postcard from my bookshelf #10

October 14, 2017 By in Post-world, Postcards from my bookshelf Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Without the millions of people putting stories into words around the planet, my quest to read a book from every country in the world would never have got off the ground. In consequence, this month, I’m sending a book to a writer.

I was encouraged to find a number of people with literary ambitions among the entrants to this giveaway. As I wrote when I got my book deal for my first novel, Beside Myself, my journey through a wide range of the globe’s stories was the key that unlocked writing for me. Prior to that project, I had spent years churning out cramped, inward-looking little half-books. Reading the world blew my imagination open and let the fresh air in.

There were many aspiring wordsmiths to choose from for this venture. A large proportion of the people who have commented on the project post maintain their own blogs or write about reading in other ways. What’s more, a significant minority of these stated explicitly that they want to be writers (NB to those of you who said this, if you’re putting words on a screen or page, you already are a writer. Writing isn’t a state of being; it’s something you do. Keep going!)

In the end, however, it was the following comment from Cheche in the Philippines that caught my eye:

Hi Ann! I’m really hoping that I could take part in this fun adventure of yours!

I’m Cheche and I’m from one of the distant provinces here in the Philipppines! I’m 25 and diagnosed with leukemia last year. Thankfully, I’m now in remission but still under maintenance treatment. Before, I have always wanted to read books that are not related to school or medical stuffs (I graduated with a degree in Medical Technology) but didn’t had enough motivation to do so and ended up reading very very few ones only. Then came my diagnosis that made me stay in my bed and at home for most of my days. It was then I finally did the thing I’ve always wanted to do – read. But mostly as a distraction from depression or a time- killer. I was surprised to find myself able to finish a book in just one day! I know this is pretty much nothing for you guys who are bookworms but I have never done that before, especially that I was on weekly chemo at that time. I discovered how much I truly love reading. And now I have my blog which has been up for a few months now. I write about my experiences and also tried one daily prompt by WordPress out of desperation. Hahah! I don’t write fast and don’t publish in a daily or weekly basis. I learned that I am able to write better if I read more. I dig up the right inspiration to start a blog after reading stories of other cancer survivors as well. I admit I’m sort of running out of motivation again and I kind of beat myself up for this since I have only started writing for just a few months. It hasn’t even been a year and I can’t seem to find the words now.

Anyways, every time I go to the bigger city, I always try to find time to drop by at Booksale to rummage through some quality second hand books from US, Canada and other places in the world at very cheap prices. For months now, I haven’t been reading a book, physically, as I find myself enjoying the blogs and Long reads from WordPress. But I am really looking forward to getting myself smelling the pages of a book again! I’ll be going to the big city probably by the end of this month for a procedure and I’ll make sure to buy books good for 2 or 3 months. I like reading inspirational books, fiction or non-fiction, real stories of survival of whatever kinds of adversities. Also I would like to read books about cancer, healthy eating, lifestyle and healing.

Thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity to share with you how reading made do something I have never thought I would ever do in my lifetime. And THANK YOU too for your utmost love for reading!

When I clicked through to Cheche’s blog, I found that her corner of the virtual world contains posts covering everything from making museli to tricycle rides. She writes a lot about her condition too. In particular, one post on the homepage stands out: To Be a Young Adult With Cancer in the Philippines. In this, Cheche describes the challenges that her condition brings, from the specific logistical issues that come with having leukaemia in her region to frustrations that must be familiar to young people battling illness everywhere:

‘With cancer, one thing is always certain- the sense of being a burden to everyone. People my age are supposed to be earning enough or maybe just starting out, but my circumstances called for unemployment. I can’t help but be angry at myself. Health and youth are supposed to go hand-in-hand, but in my case they don’t.’

I wanted to choose a book that might be a good source of companionship through the next stage of Cheche’s treatment. However, when I thought about the novels I had read to do with illness – from Venezuelan writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s The Sickness to Seeing Red by Lina Meruane from Chile – I realised that, while many of them are brilliantly written, the majority are rather pessimistic in outlook.

As a result, I turned my mind to stories concerning people facing other extreme challenges. This made me remember the various books I have encountered about child soldiers. Although several of the fictional accounts, such as Allah Is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma from Côte d’Ivoire, are understandably bleak, one very uplifting narrative sprang into my thoughts: the memoir A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah from Sierra Leone.

(Indeed, this exercise made me realise something about memoir that had never occurred to me before: by its nature, it is an optimistic form. In order to write their story, the central personage has to have survived whatever challenges they describe and got to a place where they are able to look back, process and understand.)

Cheche, I hope this book inspires you. Like, The Circle of Karma, which I sent to Ashlee back in July, this is not a translation in the literal sense of the word because it was written in English, but in many ways it does the same work: it finds the language to take us into an experience that is thankfully alien to most of us. It is not an easy read because it deals with the full range of things that make us human, from the ugliest to the most beautiful impulses. But from what I know of you, I’m sure you’re able to cope with that.

If you’d like a chance to receive a postcard from my bookshelf, visit the project post and leave a comment telling me a bit about you and what you like to read. The next recipient will be announced on November 15.