English

Interview: Lucy Beresford-Knox – the life of a Rights Manager at Penguin Books

Lucy Beresford-Knox is working as a Rights Manager at Penguin Books Ltd UK. She is selling rights in Penguin’s titles to publishers from Eastern Europe, including Romania. In Romania, Penguin is represented by Simona Kessler International Agency. We talked to Lucy about what it means to work at Penguin, about which are a Rights Manager's responsibilities and challenges, about eastern european markets, about how a book can have international success and many more. Pentru versiunea în limba română, click aici Citeşte tot articolul

interviu cu dasa drndic

Interview with Daša Drndić: „Masochism can also be entertaining”

Daša Drndić is a very well-known and appreciated Croatian novelist, playwright and literary critic, among other occupations, born in Zagreb in 1946. She studied Philology at Belgrade, then she spent some years teaching in Canada and gained an MA in Theater and Communication as part of the Fulbright Programme. She's a member of the Croatian Writers Society and PEN Croatia and, in the present, she lives in Rijeka, Croatia. Her books - I mention just a few: The Road to Saturday (1982), Leica format (2003), A Feminist Manuscript or a Political Parable: The Plays of Lillian Hellman (2006), Sonnenschein, (2007), April in Berlin (2009) - have been translated in ten languages - English, French, Polish, Hungarian, Slovene, Dutch, Italian, Slovak, Finnish and Macedonian. I hope that we'll enjoy soon enough a Romanian translation. Citeşte tot articolul

interviu cu paul bailey

Interview with Paul Bailey: „I’m not a Puritan, but I think that, sometimes, the sex scenes are unnecessary”

I met Paul Bailey, the well-known and awarded English writer, but also a critic, at the International Literature Festival in Timișoara. He wrote sixteen books, two of which are the biographies of Cynthia Payne and Quentin Crisp. Paul Bailey has been quite translated in Romanian. His most recent book, the one that we mainly talked about in this interview, is The Prince's Boy (Polirom publishing house, translated by Marius Chivu), a wonderful novel about the love between two Romanians (and not only) during the 1920's.  Citeşte tot articolul

interviu cu Jean Mattern

Jean Mattern: „I think that our role in literature, as writers, is to deal with what we cannot forget” (interview)

Jean Mattern is a French writer and editor - he coordinates, at the prestigious publishing house Gallimard, the collections of foreign literature „Du Monde entier” and „Arcades”. In Romania, Polirom publishing house translated two of his books: The Kiraly Baths (2009, collection „The Polirom Library. Prose XXI”, translated by Silviu Lupescu, foreword by Gabriela Adameşteanu) and Milk and Honey (2011, collection „The Polirom Library. Prose XXI”, translated by Anca Băicoianu). He has been several times in Romania, both to launch his volumes and to attend different meetings - for example, in 2011, Jean Mattern was invited to the fourth edition of the International Literature Festival in Bucharest (FILB) and, in 2013, he was at the first edition of the International Festival of Literature and Translation in Iași (FILIT), in both cases as a writer, not as an editor. Citeşte tot articolul

Sahar Delijani (interview) – about Iran, Revolution, Islam, family and fictionalising your own life

In her debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda tree, Sahar Delijani is using her own story as a starting point: she was born in 1983, in the Evin prison in Tehran, where, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, her activist parents were jailed. The book is a touching and meaningful testimony about a country full of contradictions. I'm very passionate about Iran and its stories and it was a great pleasure to meet Sahar Delijani at the International Literary Festival in Iași where I talked to her about the book and about the real Iran and its paradoxes, about the transition from personal experience and literature, about religion and its influence in society and politics and about the changes that Iran is going through. Pentru versiunea în limba română, click aici. Citeşte tot articolul

We asked two questions, 11 writers answered at the International Literature Festival in Timisoara

At the International Literature Festival in Timisoara (22nd - 24th of October), we had the opportunity to meet twelve great writers: Paul Bailey (Great Britain), Florin Lăzărescu (Romania), László Krasznahorkai (Hungary), Radu Pavel Gheo (Romania), Daša Drndić (Croatia), Filip Florian (Romania), Noémi Kiss (Hungary), Ornela Vorpsi (Albany, France), Jean Mattern (France), Bogdan Munteanu (Romania), Cătălin Dorian Florescu (Switzerland), Mircea Mihăieș (Romania). Because we couldn't interview all of them (even if we would have loved that), we started a kind of questionnaire, asking each author (except Mircea Mihăieș, whom we didn't manage to catch after the first event) these two questions: „How important is it for you to meet with other writers, either in a formal context, like this, at a festival, or in privat? Does it help you somehow in your creative process?”. So I invite you to read their wonderful and very different answers in the following rows.  Citeşte tot articolul

“There are a lot of people for whom the only commandment is the eleventh: «Don’t get caught»”. Interview with James MEEK

British writer and journalist James Meek (born in 1962, in London) was a correspondent for The Guardian, reporting from many war areas, such as Afghanistan or Iraq. As of 2006, he dedicated entirely to writing. His books received various prizes, such as Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize for The People's Act of Love, 2005, also nominated for Booker Prize. Pentru versiunea în limba română a interviului, click aici James Meek was invited in Romania, at the International Festival of Literature and Translation (1-5 October 2014) in Iaşi, where he talked about his latest book, The Heart Broke In (translated in Romanian by Carmen Toader, at Humanitas Fiction Publishing House). It is a modern saga, telling the story of a brother and a sister, Ritchie – a former rock star – and Bec, a scientist trying to find a vaccine for malaria –, seemingly very different, but both struggling with surviving in a world in which you can no longer tell right from wrong. We spoke with James Meek about the boundaries between truth and betrayal, about what can be thought of as moral and immoral nowadays, about freedom and illusion, and also about his different styles of writing, from magical realism to a literature within the sphere of the possible. Citeşte tot articolul

Interview with Guillermo Arriaga: „Stories never die”

Guillermo Arriaga was a guest at the International Literature and Translation Festival from Iași, Romania. He was invited to meet with the Romanian public in the second evening of the festival, on the scene of the „Vasile Alecsandri” National Theater, accompanied by the Romanian literary critic Marius Chivu, who addressed him many good questions. The public fell immediately in love with the Mexican author, screenwriter, director and producer. He was the sensation of the festival. Citeşte tot articolul

interviu cu Shani Boianjiu

Interview with Shani Boianjiu: „I wish I had been more afraid because the army was a big shock for me”

Shani Boianjiu became famous worldwide after her debut novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, was released in 2012. Until now, her book was published in twenty-three countries and was selected as one of the ten best fiction titles of 2012 by The Wall Street Journal, as one of the Pakistani Herald's best books of 2012 and as one of the Swedish Sydvenskan's best books of 2013. She was also the first Israeli writer to be long listed for the UK's Women's Prize for Fiction and the youngest recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award, among other nominations and prizes.  Citeşte tot articolul

andrew solomon

Interview: Andrew Solomon – “And that was very important for me: to have dug some kind of beauty out of the muck of despair”

  Andrew Solomon is the author of one of the most fascinating and overwhelming books: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, a comprehensive study on this terrible illness with a touching confession about his own experience. In his impressive survey, Andrew Solomon approaches depression from many different points of view: cultural, medical, social, even political. The book won The National Book Award for nonfiction and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. We are very happy and honored that Andrew Solomon kindly agreed to answer a few questions and speak about depression, personal challenges, thoughts and emotions, about happiness and sadness, his daily habits and especially about family and love. Pentru versiunea în limba română a interviului, click aici. Citeşte tot articolul

Interviu cu Andrew Cowan

Interview with Andrew Cowan: ”Our characters have our DNA”

Andrew Cowan is a British writer, a creative writing teacher and the director of this programme at the University of East Anglia. His debut novel, Pig (1994), was also translated in Romanian, in 2009, by Leda Publishing House. He won many literary prizes and distinctions for Pig: Betty Trask Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, The Authors" Club First Novel Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award. His most recent book was published last year and it is called Worthless men.  Citeşte tot articolul

interview with David Vann

Interview with David Vann: ”I think that all of my books analyze or criticize, in a way or another, men”

David Vann is an internationally-bestselling writer, whose books (Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, Dirt, Goat Mountain, Last Day On Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter şi A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea) have been translated in twenty languages and have won fifteen prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain. He has also written for important magazines, such as Esquire, Men’s Journal, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, Elle UK, Writer’s Digest etc., and he is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England. Citeşte tot articolul

interviu cu Lars Saabye Christensen si recenzie la cartea Frati pe jumatate

Lars Saabye Christensen: “If you write one extra word in the sex scene it becomes extremely embarrassing for everybody” – interview

Lars Saabye Christensen is one of the most representative contemporary Norwegian writers. Even though he also wrote children's books, scripts, plays, poetry, he is best known as a novelist. He published over twenty novels, out of which Beatles and The Half Brother were sold in over 500 000 copies together and have been translated in many languages. For The Half Brother Christensen won the The Nordic Council's Literature Prize, the most important distinction for works of literature written in one of the languages of the Nordic countries. He is also a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature. Citeşte tot articolul

Interview with Mike Ormsby: ”Writing a novel is like being in a band or a sports club: you need a good team”

Mike Ormsby is a British writer and former BBC journalist, World Service trainer and musician. In December 2013 he published his first novel, Child Witch Kinshasa, about so-called child witches in Kinshasa, Congo - as seen mainly by Frank Kean, a journalist who lands in a strange place and tries to discover its "secrets", to understand a completely different world (see synopsis and excerpts here). As I was reading this, absorbed, the second part of his novel was published - Child Witch London.  Citeşte tot articolul