As followers of this blog will know, my hero is Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the author of the landmark travel memoir An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, which was my Togolese choice for my 2012 project to read a book from every country. After the book was rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2021, Kpomassie and I became friends. In the final chapter of my new book, Relearning to Read, I write that I hope I will one day travel to Greenland with him.
This summer, I got to do just that, spending two weeks travelling along the west coast of the world’s largest island, stopping at many of the places Kpomassie first visited sixty years ago, courtesy of the expedition cruise company Aurora Expeditions (known as AE Expeditions in the UK).
It was the trip of a lifetime and a huge privilege to experience such an extraordinary place in such exceptional company. In addition to countless illuminating discussions about Kpomassie’s inspirations, and views on everything from writing and family to travel and alcohol, I got to meet some of his friends, including a woman who was four years old when Kpomassie first visited Greenland in 1965 and stayed with her family.
This weekend, the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper published my account of our adventure in their Travel supplement, giving it the honour of making it the cover story. You can find the online version here. I hope it will be the first of several kinds of storytelling that come out of this amazing adventure.
This month, a dream came true. I spent two weeks visiting Greenland with my hero, legendary Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie, sixty years after he first arrived in the country that became his home from home (an experience recorded in his landmark memoir, An African in Greenland, tr. James Kirkup, and recently rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic, titled Michel the Giant, with a new afterword, tr. Ros Schwartz).
It will take me a while to process this incredible experience and I am working on several projects to tell the story of it. Watch this space!
In the meantime, however, I decided it would only be right to make Greenlandic literature the focus for my latest Book of the month. And, it being #WITMonth, I knew I would feature a book by a female author.
If you ask anyone about contemporary Greenlandic literature, one name will dominate: Niviaq Korneliussen, a young Greenlandic writer hailed widely as the leading light of a new generation of voices telling stories on the world’s largest island. Her writing is fresh, daring and confronting, and having started the month reading her novel Last Night in Nuuk, I would have found it an easy choice to feature one of her books. (And she is extremely well worth reading – if you are looking for Greenlandic literature you should absolutely start with her.)
But as I try to highlight lesser known voices on this blog, I decided to look further afield. This brought me to Nauja Lynge’s Ivalu’s Color, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press.
Lynge is something of a hybrid writer. Describing herself as a Danish Greenlander, she is the descendant of several figures who were instrumental in establishing Greenlandic identity, including Henrik Lund, author of the national anthem, and Hans Lynge, who promoted independence. At first, given her Danish heritage, I was hesitant as to whether to include her in my reading. But as many of the conversations I have had over the past few weeks have involved the influence of colonialism and other political agendas on Greenland, and the way those stories are woven into the Inuit experience (and, as we have seen over the thirteen years of this project, storytelling is a messy, cross-pollinated business that rarely fits neatly in a single box), I decided to give Ivalu’s Color a try.
From the pitch, the novel sounds as though it follows a familiar formula. In 2015, three women are found murdered in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk. Whodunnit?
Yet, the similarities with anglophone crime fiction end with the premise. Even before you turn to the first page, it’s clear that this is a book that marches to a different beat. In place of a blurb, the back cover has a lengthy endorsement from Martin Lidegaard, former Danish foreign minister. And on the inside flaps we are told that the true victim of the crime will turn out to be the Inuit people.
This political focus continues in the body of the book. In place of an epigraph, we find an unattributed paragraph appealing for a moderate approach to Greenlandic independence:
It’s almost as if there is a chapter in our common history missing. My major concern is that we open the doors to outsiders before we are ready to welcome them. Things take time. This applies to Greenland to such an extent that we might be better off seeing ourselves as a developing country, not co-opted immediately into the international economy.
The characters of the book take a similar tone. Indeed, rather than focusing on the grisly fate of the three women whose bodies have been found in a shipping container (two of whom are barely mentioned), most of the dialogue rehearses political concerns, feeding off the fact that Ivalu, the most prominent victim, was a blogger on issues connected to independence.
Unlike the traditional anglophone detective novel, there is not one sleuth on the trail of the culprit but many. They include the Chinese agent Hong and the Russian agent Nikolai (both of whom do little to disguise their roles in trying to further their countries’ interests in controlling the Arctic), as well as local figure Else.
Like the murder victims, these characters remain relatively faceless. What seems to interest Lynge is not so much the personal stories of the figures she portrays but the bigger forces that drive them. These she explores by choosing to focus on aspects a mainstream anglophone writer would not normally centre, and selecting and ordering details in a way that might seem bewildering or even irrelevant to a Western eye. It is as though the apparatus of a European crime novel has been commandeered and turned to different ends.
As a reader, I found this challenging. The old knee-jerk irritation I often feel when I struggle to understand literature that works on other terms rose in me, and I was tempted to dismiss the book as bad. Indeed, there are aspects of Ivalu’s Color that will be deeply problematic for many anglophone readers, particularly when it comes to the presentation of Hong. Lynge describes him and his actions in terms that betray a strikingly different, even shocking, approach to presenting otherness.
There is also a challenging discussion of femininity and ‘primal’ womanhood running throughout the book, which at times seems to take a stand against ‘the modern age’s fussily democratic women’. This, when set against Hong’s shocking encounter with Else, raises uneasy questions.
However, as I continued on through the pages of this book, I found another Greenlandic title that I was reading in conjunction with it beginning to shift my thinking. Knud Rasmussen’sThe People of the Polar North, tr. and ed. G. Herring, features the verbatim accounts of many Inuit myths collected by the great explorer on his expeditions through his homeland. Striking and strange, these tales share some of the hallmarks of Lynge’s writing. There is a similar relative effacement of the individual and focus on bigger forces. Extreme and sometimes shocking acts are presented baldly and with little ceremony. They inhabit a framework that calibrates ideas of community, duty, tradition, physicality and individuality very differently. Perhaps Lynge was fusing the storytelling ethos of the country of her birth with the commercial structures of European literature? Wasn’t that, in itself, thought-provoking and subversive?
For me, Ivalu’s Color wasn’t an easy or enjoyable read, but it was a valuable one. It was fascinating to see Nauja Lynge testing the limits of a familiar genre and trying to reshape them to accommodate her aims. It was a reminder that truly reading widely (far beyond the offerings that the mainstream outlets curate for us) requires openness, and a readiness to embrace gaps and questions. There is still so much we don’t know.
Ivalu’s Color by Nauja Lynge, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press (IPI, 2017)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in March 2012, when I posted about my Togolese pick for my year of reading the world, I said that Tété-Michel Kpomassie was the writer I would most like to meet. Little did I know then that, almost exactly a decade later, I would be speaking to him.
Yesterday, however, I got to realise my dream (virtually at least) and spent 40 minutes talking to the intrepid explorer, whose extraordinary journey across the world to live with the Inuit in the 1960s has long been an inspiration for me.
The call came about after I heard the wonderful news that Kpomassie’s groundbreaking memoir, An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, was being reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a new afterword, translated by Ros Schwartz. When Penguin contacted me about it, I seized the opportunity to ask to speak with the great man, who is now 80 and lives in France.
It turned out to be one of the most joyful, thrilling and thought-provoking conversations of my life. I was humbled to hear Kpomassie say that he saw parallels between our quests because they both came out of a desire to push beyond received notions and meet the world on our own terms. And my delight knew no bounds when, holding up the beautiful new English-language edition of his book, I saw Kpomassie raise a copy of my novel, Beside Myself, in reply.
We covered many things. I asked Kpomassie how he maintained so much energy and enthusiasm after living with the aftermath of his life-defining journey for so many decades. ‘It’s easy,’ he told me. ‘I am still the same person.’
He went on to explain that, for him, the extraordinary adventure he began as a teenager has always had the quality of a mission – a calling entrusted to him by the surprising collision of many factors (the appearance of the python that gave him his fear of snakes; the baffling presence of a book about Greenland in a shop in rural Togo; the fact that his six years of education gave him just enough French to understand the text and conceive his ambition to run away to this treeless, snake-free land).
A big part of this mission involves opening up the minds of young Africans to the wider world. ‘I think Africans should learn many languages and travel,’ he told me. But he is clear that this must work both ways. There should be greater prominence for and celebration of African culture internationally.
For Kpomassie, language is central to this. ‘We have more than 100 languages in Togo, yet if a young boy can’t speak French perfectly, he cannot succeed. That’s ridiculous,’ he told me, going on to say that it was similarly outrageous that African nations are among the few that don’t speak their own languages when they go to international conventions such as those at the UN.
He would like to see a Pan-African language chosen as the continent’s lingua franca – whether Swahili, Wolof or another widely spoken tongue. This, he says, would play a powerful role in evening up international relations and cultural exchange: people around the world would learn it in much the same way as many European languages are studied, thereby opening up opportunities for African linguists and translators.
The point, he stressed, was to be respectful and evenhanded. ‘No culture is better than another.’
Kpomassie has seen firsthand the damage favouring one culture over another can do. He still remembers the outrage and confusion the European missionaries caused when they tried to convince his father to abandon seven of his eight wives and marry one in a Christian ceremony, an action that would have spelled disaster for many of his brothers and sisters, and could have started a feud with neighbouring villages.
Yet it wasn’t until he reached Greenland that the extent of the wrongs done by colonial evangelism became clear to Kpomassie. ‘They changed the words [of the Lord’s Prayer] to “Give us this day our daily seal”,’ he told me. ‘But no-one gives you a seal at minus 40 degrees. You have to work really hard for it. I realised then that “Give us this day our daily bread” was a lie used to control us.’
Different though they were in so many ways, Kpomassie found parallels between the animism of the Inuit and the traditional beliefs of his community. There was a respect for nature and a sense of oneness with the environment that he found lacking in many European settlers, who made handbags out of the pythons that were sacred to locals in Togo.
This is one of the reasons that, as he writes in the afterword of the new edition of Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland, on some level, he never really left Greenland. And it is why he will move back there later this year. After a lecture tour, he plans to live out his days reading and writing in the country that won his heart more than 50 years ago. ‘This time,’ he says, ‘I will not return.’
Mahala was in London to interview one of a handful of surviving friends and associates of the dissident writer Can Themba, who died in the late 1960s. Having written his doctorate on Themba’s work, Mahala is now preparing a biography of the great man – the first of its kind.
We walked to Waterstones bookshop in Gower Street. On the way, I pointed out the University of London’s Senate House Library, where I did a lot of research for my book Reading the World (called The World Between Two Covers in the US), and Mahala told me about his research into Themba, which had thrown up some fascinating stories about mixed-race relationships that flouted South Africa’s former morality laws.
This put me in mind of Born a Crime, Trevor Noah’s brilliant account of growing up with mixed parentage under Apartheid. When I mentioned it, I was thrilled to find that Noah is an old friend of Mahala’s – yet another reminder of the web of connections that books spin between readers and writers around the world.
Over frothy coffee in the bookshop’s café, Mahala filled me in on his writing over the past eight years. He’s been busy. Despite working full-time for the government and completing his doctoral thesis, he has found time to write a play, The House of Truth. Also based on Themba’s life, it was a run-away success when it opened in South Africa in 2016 and is now being developed into a film.
Meanwhile, he has continued to work on short-form fiction. Last year, he published Red Apple Dreams & Other Stories, a collection combining some of his favourite pieces from African Delights with new work. He’d generously brought a copy for me, in which he wrote a beautiful dedication, and he is keen to find a European outlet for his work. Publishers, take note!
However, Mahala’s enthusiasm really caught fire when I asked him for recommendations of other contemporary South African writers whose work I should explore. Seizing my notebook, he quickly filled a page with a list of the following names: Zakes Mda, Masande Ntshanga, Nthikeng Mohlele, Thando Mgqolozana, Cynthia Jele, Angela Makholwa, Zukiswa Wanner, Mohale Mashigo, Niq Mhlongo and Fred Khumalo.
Always intrigued to test bookshops’ international mettle, I proposed that we see if we could find them on the shelves. The results were disappointing, although, to her credit, the bookseller who helped us did suggest a novel by another young South African writer in the absence of any of Mahala’s picks. This was Evening Primrose by Kopano Matlwa.
The suggestion flummoxed Mahala at first. Although he knew of the author, he had not heard of this book. In the end, however, he solved the mystery – in South Africa, the novel had been published with a much more direct title: Period Pain.
Although none of Mahala’s suggestions were readily available, I did spot a familiar name during our search. Tucked amid the Ms was a copy of my debut novel, Beside Myself. I bought this as a gift for Mahala and we persuaded another member of staff to snap the picture at the start of this post: two authors brought together across thousands of miles, holding each other’s stories.
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.
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.
This project has led to many extraordinary experiences for me. From speaking at TED Global and delivering TEDx talks in Geneva and Hanoi to having a book translated specially for me by a team of volunteers and appearing on a panel with the deputy prime minister of Jordan at the Knowledge Summit in Dubai, my quest has opened up many more things than I could ever have imagined when, one rainy night in October 2011, I decided to try and read a book from every country in the world.
Last weekend brought another first: seeing my face on a large cube sculpture (pictured above). The cube was one of a number of installations at the Brahmaputra Literary Festival in Guwahati, India, where I and some 130 other writers from 20 countries met at the invitation of the Publication Board of Assam to engage in three days of panel discussions about books.
At least, I was supposed to be there for three days. In the event, however, a cancelled flight meant my journey got rather delayed and, after an erratic, three-stop hop across the world (taking in Cairo, Kuwait and Hyderabad), I arrived in Guwahati with just 34 hours to go until I was due to leave again.
The experience was worth the effort, however. From the moment I was met at arrivals and driven through the city, where banners advertising the festival fluttered from almost every hoarding and the faces of the writers taking part smiled at me from giant arches over the road, I knew I had been invited to join in something extraordinary.
The celebratory mood was heightened by the fact that the date of my arrival was a special day in India. As my wonderful guide, Pourshali, one of the many young volunteers helping to make the festival a success, explained, that Sunday was Saraswati Puja, a celebration of the goddess of knowledge. As a result, the women of the city, Pourshali included, were wearing their finest saris.
Along with the occasional glimpses of my face on advertising hoardings, I was delighted and occasionally unnerved by the sight of many exquisitely dressed people in flowing skirts riding pillion and side-saddle on the back of mopeds weaving through the traffic.
Generously, Pourshali gave up her share in the festivities to show me around. Our adventures included trips to the science museum – a thought-provoking monument to the discoveries of the mid-twentieth century, featuring a display of planets minus Pluto – and a mall where, under the bewildered eyes of the shop assistants, she took the role of personal shopper, advising me on purchases. ‘They are thinking, “What are these two people doing together? They look like they’re from different worlds,”‘ she whispered to me with a laugh.
The highlight, though, was the festival itself. Despite my late arrival, I managed to sit in on several fascinating sessions, including a discussion of fictional portrayals of sport, and a consideration of literature by prisoners of conscience, featuring the courageous Burmese writers Dr Ma Thida and Nyi Pu Lay.
The next day, after an evening of chats over dinner with Australia’s YA author Neil Grant and Indonesian novelist Ahmad Fuadi, among many others, it was my turn. My first session brought me into conversation with one of Pan Macmillan India’s senior commissioning editors, Teesta Guha Sarkar, author and editor Sutapa Basu and author and editor KE Priyamvada to discuss why writers need editors. We agreed on the need for trust and respect between writers and editors, and explored the tricks you might use to bring texture to a threadbare manuscript. Chief among these were giving characters quirks and applying fiction techniques to non-fiction.
Fifteen minutes later, I was in the hotseat, moderating a discussion on the role of research in creating fictional worlds. My panel were an international bunch, comprising Latvian bestseller Janis Jonevs, Lithuanian novelist Gabija Grusaite, award-winning Shehan Karunatilaka from Sri Lanka, celebrated and prolific Indian novelist Arup Dutta, and Assamese prizewinner Jayanta Bora.
An hour was only long enough to scratch the surface of the topic. Nevertheless, the discussion generated some excellent insights into the writing process, shared to a packed audience largely made up of students from schools and colleges across the state. While Jonevs talked about the pain of emotional research and the challenge of projecting himself back into his teenage self, Grusaite explained how a new development in a real-life Malaysian murder case had changed the course of her plot. Karunatilaka raised many a laugh with his tales of hanging out with drunk old men and watching cricket, Dutta described observing elephant trapping, and Bora talked about the 25 years of research that went into his debut.
Perhaps the most inspiring talk I participated in, however, was not on stage but during a conversation with festival curator Rahul Jain, during which the reasons for the effort that had gone into arranging and promoting the festival became clear.
‘We don’t have a literary culture,’ he told me. ‘But if these young people come here and see writers being glorified and people running from tent to tent as though literature is their lifeblood, they will realise that writers are important for a civilised society.
‘They can’t all be writers. But they can all be readers.’
Earlier this month, I was honoured to be one of the speakers at TEDx Hanoi. Taking place at the city’s United Nations International School, the day-long event presented a fascinating collection of talks around the theme ‘Toward a Global Community’.
While Professor Kourosh Kayvani, founder of Aurecon’s Design Academy and mastermind behind the technicalities of Wembley stadium in the UK and the flagship football venue in Doha, reflected on the potential of engineering to solve problems, environmental activist Huong Le spoke about #SaveSonDoong, her campaign to protect the world’s largest cave from insensitive commercial development. There were also talks on career advice, architecture and the role that history can play in helping us live wisely – this last presentation was given by former diplomat Madame Ninh, a very inspiring person and prominent figure in Vietnam, who was constantly surrounded by young women eager to learn from her.
There were also several great presentations and performances from school students, among them Minh Quan Do, an aspiring poet and poetry translator, and South Korean yo-yo player, Hyunjoon Choi. And for those keen to do more than simply sit and listen, there were improv comedy workshops and self-defence classes in the breaks, as well as the opportunity to take a virtual tour of the majestic Son Doong, about which Huong Le spoke so powerfully.
For me, the event was special for three reasons. Not only did it give me chance to visit a new country and meet some fascinating people, but it also allowed me to reflect on what reading the world has taught me six years on from my original quest. This was exciting as there have been so many interesting things that have happened since the project, so it was wonderful to have the opportunity to share some of the more recent insights I have gained from interactions around stories from elsewhere.
Thanks to the organisers of TEDx Hanoi for a very inspiring day and a wonderful trip.
