If you’re a former fan of Love German Books, you might know what to expect here: news, reviews, random thoughts and gossip on books written in German. I wrote the blog for ten years from 2008 on, then ran out of steam. Now, though, it is here at V&Q Books in a more collaborative form. …
What treasures lie in wait among the nominations for Germany’s biggest literary award? A writer friend and I have an annual tradition, usually performed lying on towels at our local lido. On the morning of the announcement, we pick over the longlist for the German Book Prize and choose our favourite nominations, and also draw …
Short stories are such a big part of my life right now. I’m just finishing my translation of Judith Hermann’s We’d Have Told Each Other Everything – which isn’t actually a short story collection. What it is, I find hard to categorise, but it is a very beautiful and fascinating book about life and writing …
Summer’s the perfect time to focus on women’s writing in translation, with #WiTMonth running all August on social media – and hopefully on your bookshelves. The campaign’s been running for ten years now and we’ve seen a massive increase in women-authored books published in translation since Meytal Radzinski got the ball rolling in 2014. Back …
In Germany (and the Netherlands, and a number of other countries) the young generation has been raised on a media diet incredibly rich in English-language content. Talk to anyone from about 30 and under, and you’ll probably find they speak extremely good English. It’s amazing! They’re great! They’re on TikTok and all those platforms, and …
Berlin has a great new literary attraction! Until the end of January, that is… A vacant retail space has been temporarily transformed into a museum dedicated to Charlottenburg’s legendary Romanisches Café – the inter-war site of many a literary gossip session, chess matches galore and artistic inspiration in spades. Imagine the Algonquin Round Table but …
In the case of Rude Girl, it was blindingly obvious who the translator ought to be: the book’s own subject, Priscilla Layne, who had previously published several translations from German. In fact, the project made no sense without her on board, so we were thrilled when she agreed to work on the book. Here’s her …
By Rachel McNicholl Some of my friends know that I’ve been tipping away at Hotel Amerika by Maria Leitner for a number of years, offering it to English-language publishers with a sample translation and all that goes with it. So far without success, though a few recent developments (and Love German Books II) might help …
By Helen MacCormac This year marks the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death. Although he is one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, no one had ever heard of him when he died in 1924. Now, 100 years later, the man who brought us Gregor Samsa is being celebrated around the world. Events …
One of the things I particularly love about our new graphic novel Rude Girl is all the music in it. Music? In a comic? Yeah, baby! Birgit Weyhe tells the story of Priscilla Layne, in conjunction with Layne herself – and since music is such a major part of her life, we get a peek …
You know when you love a TV show so much that you want to recommend books for all the characters to read? You do, right, it’s not just me? That’s what happened with BBC’s brand new drama series This Town, set in the West Midlands in 1981 as riots rage and a band forms, inspired …