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 …
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 …
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 …
The last London Book Fair I attended was in 2019. In 2020 I was all set to fly over and take on the role of “translator of the fair”, with a poster-sized photo of me up outside the Olympia venue and events lined up – when the fair was rightly cancelled. There wasn’t an in-person …
Translators have been concerned about technology since St Jerome stubbed a toe on a newfangled scroll. Actually, though, there are some ways in which it has done us good. Although I still own a barrage of paper dictionaries, I no longer work with a big fat yellow book open on my lap and I enjoy …
There are two big-budget book prizes in Germany: in autumn the German Book Prize, and in spring the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. The season’s nominees – announced today by the Leipzig Book Fair – get a lot of extra attention, special readings, and a sales boost. They can come from any German-speaking country but Germany …
The German-language literary magazine landscape is beset by similar challenges as the Anglophone one: funding is hard to find, energy is finite, so projects tend to peter out after a while. I took a trawl through the German-language litmags listed at Literaturport and noticed that a good few of them have folded since Covid, sadly. …
A review by Katy Derbyshire Dilek Güngör’s latest book launched a fortnight ago at a packed Berlin event, where the love flowing back and forth between the stage and the audience was palpable. Dilek – full disclosure: I think we’re friends, we’ve definitely been for a coffee together and I’ve translated an essay she wrote, …