London Review Bookshop Podcasts

This event took place in association with English PEN, which exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers' freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly cooperation of writers and free exchange of ideas. PEN's Writers in Translation programme has, during the past five years, championed over 35 titles by writers from all over the globe, and supports the three speakers here.

Yang Lian's poems collapse distances by combining a deep attention to the particular with the allusiveness of classical Chinese poetry, in which a word or image can contain all of tradition: 'With the cry of a wild goose, I am drawn into the Tang Dynasty at the instant of hearing, making Lee valley's waters flow twelve hundred years upstream.' Yang Lian was in conversation with his translator, Brian Holton, and Iain Sinclair, poet, documentary-novelist and East Londoner.

An important champion of francophone literature, Mabanckou is both a writer engage, and a very engaging man. Teaching at the time in the French literature department at UCLA, he made a rare visit to London for the festival. Mabanckou talked about his work with Helen Stevenson, translator of Broken Glass and author of several books, including Instructions for Visitors: Life and Love in a French Town.

Edward Said described Elias Khoury as an artist who gives 'voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages'. Khoury was in discussion with the writer and journalist Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, who has written extensively on Khoury's life and work.

Julian Bell and Peter Campbell talked about things that painters can and can't do, in particular about the relationship painters have had to old art and the limits and opportunities that arise from society, its technology and its institutions.

In conversation with the novelist Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem read from Chronic City and discussed, inter alia, Manhattan's virtuality, the inspiration behind the character of Perkus Tooth, the price of things, and talking animals.

With his new play about Auden and Britten, The Habit of Art, playing to packed houses at the National Theatre, Alan Bennett visited the Bookshop to read from his introduction to the play and to answer an eclectic range of questions from the audience.

LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, and contributors Jeremy Harding and John Lanchester, discussed the pleasures and pitfalls of writing family histories, under the chairmanship of LRB publisher Nicholas Spice.

A.S. Byatt and Adam Thirlwell both talked about their work, and discussed European literature and the art of the novel.

Sarah Dunant and Hilary Mantel read from Sacred Hearts and Wolf Hall, their respective latest novels, and discussed the particular challenges of writing historical novels and the importance of research with Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck College.

Four past winners of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize gathered in the Paul Hamlyn Library to discuss the difficulties of selling translated literature, the cultural resources available to translators, working on dead authors, translating dialect, and a host of other tricky areas involved in literary translation. The panel was chaired by the Arts Council's Kate Griffin.

A few days after the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Ma Jian discussed his Tiananmen novel Beijing Coma with the Independent's literary editor Boyd Tonkin, interspersed with extracts from the novel read by his translator Flora Drew.

Faïza Guène discussed immigration in France, her success as a writer and what the French papers made of it all, the pleasures of writing in the first person and much more with her translator Sarah Ardizzone at the Bookshop's inaugural World Literature Weekend. Interpreter: Carine Kennedy.

Launching the Bookshop's inaugural World Literature Weekend, Hanan al-Shaykh gave a lively reading from her memoir of her mother, The Locust and the Bird, as well as discussing the book with novelist Esther Freud.

As part of Faber & Faber's 80th anniversary celebrations, the London Review Bookshop welcomed two Faber authors to read from and discuss their first works: Sarah Hall's debut novel Haweswater and Clare Wigfall's collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing.