London Review Bookshop Podcasts

Two translators – Shaun Whiteside and Mike Mitchell – went head to head with their versions of a previously untranslated work. Novelist Daniel Kehlmann provided the challenge, with the event chaired by Daniel Hahn, interim director of the BCLT and chair of the Translators Association.

Award-winning Swedish crime writers Karin Alvtegen and Håkan Nesser, chaired by Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at UCL, explore the power behind crime fiction's gripping narratives, its incisive portrayal of society and its confrontation with ideas of good and evil in a shades-of-grey world, where simple moral certainties aren't so easy to find.

Novelists Daniel Kehlmann and Benjamin Markovits share interests in their work in biography, genius and failure, charisma and the question of how to give voice to real historical figures but have differences too; both make fuel for a very interesting conversation.

Prize-winning poet, essayist, dramatist and actor Ramsey Nasr was voted Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2009. Nasr was in conversation with prizewinning British poet Ruth Padel, who has published seven poetry collections, a wide range of non-fiction, and a novel, Where the Serpent Lives.

Writing in El Pa’s, Jordi Gracia described Os libros arden mal as 'a novel that could have been history or biography, but is instead a work of literature written by an author at the height of his powers'. Manuel Rivas read from his work and talked with Jonathan Dunne, who has translated several of his books into English.

The Anatomy of a Moment is a patient dissection of a key episode in recent European history – the attempted coup in Spain in 1981. In his meticulous analysis of the moment when gunmen stormed the Spanish parliament, Javier Cercas has created an intriguing book which occupies a fascinating space between fiction and reality. Paul Preston, Professor of Spanish History at LSE joined Cercas to discuss the challenges of historical writing in a conversation chaired by Lisa Hilton, acclaimed author of Queen’s Consort.

Catalan novelists Najat el Hachmi, Carles Casajuana and Teresa Solana, chaired by Peter Bush, discussed their work and the experience of being Catalan novelists.

One of the Netherlands' most distinguished living authors, Cees Nooteboom discussed short stories, death and translation with A.S. Byatt. Chaired by Jan Dalley, Arts Editor of the Financial Times.

Ali Smith read from her novel There but for the (Hamish Hamilton) and discussed her work with the audience.

Richard Sennett came to the Bookshop to discuss The Foreigner, a pair of essays in which he explores displacement in the metropolis through two vibrant historical moments: mid-19th-century Paris Renaissance Venice.

An evening of poetry was held at the Bookshop to celebrate the publication of David Harsent's collection, *Night*. Jo Shapcott and Don Paterson joined David Harsent for a spellbinding set of readings, touching upon bee-keeping, Rothko, saints and siestas, and culminating in an atmospheric reading from *Night* itself.

Patti Smith's reading, drawn from her extensive body of work, including Just Kids, and alongside those writers she has long loved and advocated, was programmed in association with Artevents.

On the eve of its confirmation as one of the six Man Booker shortlisted books for 2010, Tom McCarthy's ambitious and exhilarating novel C was the subject for discussion between its author and novelist Lee Rourke. McCarthy reads from C and considers its structure and themes – in particular its roots in the work of key 20th century theorists, literary, philosophical and psychological.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, described by Le Monde as the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, was regarded as so dangerous to the Soviet state that Mikhail Suslov declared that it could not be published for at least 200 years. Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman, Vasily's daughter by his first wife, came to know her father only gradually. At first she saw little of him except during New Year holidays. In the mid-1950s she moved from the Ukraine to Moscow, and they became close in the last ten years of his life.

How can the same thing be said in a different language, when the language carries the assumptions of a whole culture with it? How do you balance spirit and accuracy? What do you do with slang and puns and untranslatable words? However many questions we ask about translation in the abstract, we rarely see how it actually works. This event was about giving time and attention to that process.