When Anne’s father dies, she is left grieving a contradiction. Jean-Pierre was a man of many faces: the self-taught philosopher born into poverty; the Buddhist who marked favourite haikus with maple leaves; the old romantic who ends every evening kissing a pixelated portrait of his late wife; and the violent bully, whose alcoholism marks his family’s life in terrible ways. Sorting through his belongings and making funeral preparations, Anne tries to come to terms with who and what she’s lost.

Told with a quick wit and deep tenderness, Before I Forget is a tragicomic portrait of loss and a novel for anyone who’s ever loved a so-called monster.

‘A perfect strike: funny, emotional, political, and unflinchingly accurate.’ – Virginie Despentes

'There is a gorgeous tumbling present in these pages, a kind of slipperiness that presents itself in all the same ways we experience grief: pain and pleasure, joy and desperation. Before I Forget is a lovely ode to memory and trauma, but it's also a reminder that we hold so much love inside us that we can't help but inevitably leak and spill. Admirably brilliant work.' – Kristen Arnett

'Before I Forget... beautifully describes the claustrophobia and messiness of the grieving process... It’s darkly witty, so moving and can’t fail to stay with you.'– Service95

'A modest, beautiful tribute to death... From a subject that could descend into miserabilism, Anne Pauly produces a beautiful novel with burlesque moments.’– Elisabeth Philippe, L'Obs

'Humour and pain are always intertwined in this book, often in the same sentence.' – Oonagh Devitt Tremblay, Fallow

Translator bio
Dina Leifer is a London-based translator and writer. She switched career from journalism to translation in 2015 after gaining an MA in Translating Popular Culture. Dina’s first picture book, And Eddie Had an Egg, was published by Green Bean Books in 2025 after she won the 2023 UK Jewish Children’s Book Award. She won Stevns Translation Prize in 2025, and Before I Forget is her first translation of adult fiction.

Author bio
Anne Pauly is a writer working and living in Paris. Her first book, Avant que j'oublie, was awarded the 2020 Prix du Livre Inter and Prix Robert Walser, and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina, Prix Wepler, and Prix Goncourt. Anne has since written short stories for several reviews, a televised series, and a play. She is currently finishing a second novel, while working on a play for the Théâtre du Nord along with seven other writers, including Virginie Despentes, Paul B. Preciado, and Julien Delmaire.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.peirenepress.com/shop/books/before-i-forget/

Ada d’Adamo is mother to Daria. Their days are absorbed by caregiving and routine. Daria’s profound needs remained undetected in pregnancy, and with her birth, Ada’s world is remade.

As a dancer she must use her physicality in new ways, to keep her daughter safe. As a writer she must find a language to communicate beyond words. And when, on the cusp of her fifties, Ada herself becomes gravely ill, she takes the most courageous decision of all: to leave Daria their story.

This is Gravity, a journey of isolation, anger and sometimes despair, through moments of joy and exquisite tenderness, towards a love stronger than life.

'A magnificent book. A wonderful dialogue between a mother and a daughter... A story like this belongs to everyone. It's a gift: in these cases we say thank you, and we smile.' La Repubblica Concita de Gregorio

'A book about pain is successful when it is also a book full of happiness. And when you read the first page, you understand that Come d'aira is a book that radiates happiness.' Corriere della Sera Paolo di Stefano

Translator bio
Alex Valente (he/him) is a bisexual bilingual Britalian on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land. He can be found in tiny writing on the credits page of books, when publishers remember to name the translator.

Author bio
Ada d’Adamo was an essayist and poet from Italy. After giving birth to her disabled daughter Aria, d’Adamo became an advocate for people with disabilities and for interabled families. While working on a memoir for her daughter, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She passed away on the 1st of April 2023. Three months later her memoir, Gravity, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award.

BUY THE BOOK: https://akoyapublishing.com/products/gravity

Croatia, autumn 2022. The tourist season has ended, and Split settles into an uneasy quiet. Ines works the reception desk of a seaside hotel. Her mother, Katja, a cleaner, keeps the family afloat and cares for Ines and her younger brother, Mario. When Inspector Zvone is called to an abandoned factory on the city’s edge, he finds the body of seventeen-year-old Viktorija, daughter of a respected local doctor. The murder shocks the community and sends ripples through the lives of Ines, Katja, and Zvone—each forced to confront truths they would rather keep buried. As suspicion deepens and loyalties fracture, Mother of Sorrows becomes a devastating exploration of love, guilt, and denial. With quiet ferocity, it confronts us with a haunting question: what are we willing to sacrifice to protect those we love—and what are the consequences when we do?

“Mother of Sorrows,” translated from the Croatian by Matt Robinson, is told in short chapters from its various characters’ points of view. The story is a police procedural with benefits: an investigatory chronicle that explores issues of free will and fate (“there was something toxic and corrupting in their blood,” Ines thinks of her family) against a backdrop of consumerist glamour and moral decay — The Wall Street Journal

Translator bio
Matt Robinson (1978) is a former Reuters foreign correspondent. He translates books by Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian writers, including the works of the award-winning Croatian crime writer Jurica Pavičić.

Author bio
Jurica Pavičić (1965) is a Croatian novelist, screenwriter, short-story writer and journalist. His crime novel Red Water (published in Croatian in 2017 and in English in 2025) won ‘Le Point’ award and ‘Grand prix de la littérature policière’’ for the best European crime novel in 2021. The Sunday Times named the English edition of Red Water 'Best Crime Novel 2025'.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.bitterlemonpress.com/collections/crime-thrillers-new-books/products/mother-of-sorrows

A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind. In his family, mental illness has shaped lives for generations, and time in psychiatric wards has become almost a rite of passage. His battle to avoid inheriting his grandmother’s suicidal behavior, his mother’s bipolar disorder, or his father’s bouts with alcoholism and depression spurs him to flee Germany for New York, via Paris and Vienna, only to end up in just the kind of mental institution that so terrified him. But he works there as a psychologist rather than undergo treatment as a patient himself, and learns that a person is always more than a diagnosis. In this picaresque novel, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, the protagonist is forced to confront the question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?

“Irresistible. A book that is at once grave and light, tender and tough, satirical and earnest.” — Siri Hustvedt, author of The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves and Ghost Stories

“Illuminating . . . moves at a roving pace . . . Botany of Madness is a riveting novel in which a man weighs mental illness with prismatic precision, his work involving scientific classifications, autofiction, and memory.” — Foreword Reviews

Translator bio
Alexandra Roesch has translated twelve works of fiction and nonfiction including writings by Hans Fallada, Seraina Kobler, and Stefanie vor Schulte, and has been awarded the inaugural John Calder Translation Prize. Based in Frankfurt, she holds an MA in translation from the University of Bristol.

Author bio
Leon Engler grew up in Munich and studied theater, film, and psychology in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He has published several plays and short stories and works as an author, psychologist, and lecturer in psychology and creative writing. Botany of Madness is his first novel.

BUY THE BOOK: www.newvesselpress.com

Gottland opens an unusual window on the history of Central Europe, in particular the part of it occupied by the Czechs. Mariusz Szczygieł presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Czechs as a nation, gathering together a wide-ranging cast of characters: the sculptor commissioned to build the world’s biggest statue of Stalin; the stage star who was Goebbels’ lover; Franz Kafka’s niece; Karel Gott, who won the “Most Popular Male Singer” award a record thirty-six times; and the Bata brothers, founders of a shoe empire that shod half the world. Many of these people’s lives were marked by tragedy as they fell victim to the historical events that engulfed twentieth-century Europe. One of Europe’s preeminent investigative journalists and a devoted Czechophile, Szczygieł is uniquely placed to capture this country and its people through these bizarre, tragic stories. Built from meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Gottland is a mesmerising and offbeat tour of the nation that gave us Franz Kafka, Václav Havel and Tom Stoppard.

“One of those delightfully unclassifiable books... Szczygieł is strange and funny, constantly off at jaunty tangents.” Julian Barnes, Book of the Year, The Guardian

”Extraordinary... Gottland is one of the funniest books I have read and one of the shrewdest about what it was like to live under fascism and communism, the experience of so much of Europe in the last century. It is not about Czechoslovakia or Poland or even limited to Mitteleuropa, but about how one copes with tyranny and corruption and preserves a conscience... Important and enjoyable.” The Spectator

”Many of the stories in Mariusz Szczygieł's portrait of Czechoslovakia could have come from the pages of Kafka... Absorbing, offbeat history.” The Financial Times

”Non-fiction stories from Czechoslovakia, which show a country more fantastical than even its wildest literature led us to believe.” The Guardian

”Gottland offers an indelible account of the ravages of 20th-century totalitarianism and the way it continues to pollute human thought and behavior in the 21st century.” New York Times

Translator bio
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. Her recent published translations include Not There by Mariusz Szczygieł, reportage about (broadly understood) loss, and as compiler and co-translator, The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories.

Author bio
Mariusz Szczygieł is one of Europe’s most celebrated journalists. A reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza, he is the author of a number of books of reportage about the Czech Republic and Poland. His books have been published in twenty-one countries and have been awarded the Europe Book Prize and the Prix Amphi, among other honours. From 1995–2001, he hosted a popular talk show on Polish television. Szczygieł runs the Institute of Reportage in Warsaw, a creative writing reportage school, and Dowody na Isnienie, an independent publishing house. Not There won the Nike Award and Nike Readers' Award in Poland on publication in 2019.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.lindeneditions.com/shop/p/gottland-exploding-stalin-and-other-true-tales-from-the-heart-of-europe-by-mariusz-szczygie-translated-by-antonia-lloyd-jones

A comic, irreverent and mournful romp of a book, set in 2016 with flashbacks to the '40s, '70s and '90s, and one quick journey all the way back to Ancient Greece.

The hero Aris is a young man, early 20s, sinking into a quicksand of confusion and of angst. As a baby he was adopted by a German couple, a sort of act of reparation for atrocities committed by Germany in Greece in World War II. A dying Greek woman in the nursing home where he works in southern Germany sends him on an odyssey to Greece to find and deliver a secret briefcase to her granddaughter. Tales of Aris’s absurd adventures in modern-day down-and-out Athens are interwoven with the experiences of a young Greek boy named Stylanios during the German occupation of World War II Greece, who flees to a monastery in Mount Athos, narrowly missing explosions and atrocities around him. We ultimately learn that the two stories are entwined.

The writing is informal and engaging, the dialogue is raw and hilarious, and the novel has a wonderful sense of place, with scenes set in the taverns and greasy spoons of small-town Germany and contemporary Athens, as well as in the villages and monasteries of the countryside in war-time Greece.

“…The trip is beset with all sorts of unpleasantness, hilarious twists and turns, and harsh reality, softened only by the fact that Bekas tells the story with such zest and affection for his characters, that you simply fall in love with them all as the story progresses.” Marcus Weingärtner, Berliner Zeitung, December 10, 2018 “A bold, spirited book that shows how one’s homeland is a blend of the past and the present.” Rainer Moritz, Chrismon.de, January 17, 2019

Sylvia Franke translates fiction and creative non-fiction from German to English. Her translations have appeared in "The Malahat Review" and "The Antigonish Review".
- 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Recipient
- 2023 Long-listed for the John Dryden Translation Competition

Gerasimos Bekas is a writer, playwright and theatre producer. He grew up in Greece and southern Germany. Past winner of a literary stipend from the Bavarian Academy of Writing, he won the 2014 taz Audience Award at Germany’s annual Open Mike event. His theatre productions include “The Dogs” (Athens Epidavros Festival 2024), “Republik of Baklava” (Athens Epidavros Festival 2021), “Das große Wundenlecken” (Staatstheater Augsburg 2016), “Glitsch-Gott” (Maxim Gorki Theatre 2015), “G for Gademis” (Greek National Theatre 2015). “All The Good Guys Were Dead” is his debut novel. Visit him at https://www.gerasimosbekas.com/.

Publisher's website: https://www.rowohlt.de/verlag/rights/book/gerasimos-bekas-alle-guten-waren-tot-9783498006846?srsltid=AfmBOopQ2IkoH5CWl8O2JLfykZcPVKaQRbeT6rMYrrj5RB1FVMFrqXDB

These are examples of pairs of rhyming lines, translated into rhyming lines - for music or publishing clients, matching meaning, style and form as the clients requested.
Aside from the four projects quoted from, other projects mentioned in the video are:

Kistehén: albums “Picsába az urhajókkal,” EMI Music, “A Man in a Tree,” Yonas Media, “I’m in Love with Every Lady,” Eastblok Music.

Loui: "Solid Solo Songs," released by Brooks Kiadó.

Vilmos Gryllus: "Maszkabál" cartoon DVD, Cinemon (Hungary).

European Romanticism, published by Bloomsbury

New Order, published by Arc Publications

Gregory Vajda: "Gulliver in Faremido," released by BMC Records

David Houston-Hill is the co-writer or translator of songs released by Kistehén (EMI Music), Gregory Vajda (BMC Records), Vilmos Gryllus (Cinemon) and Loui (Brooks). He has translated scripts for ContentLab&Factory and the Baltazar Theatre and literature for De Gruyter and Bloomsbury, working from German, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian. He has also authored verse collections under contract with KenArnoldBooks and the National Poetry Foundation. As a journalist, he has edited the Anti-Corruption Report and the Budapest Business Journal and been a Mergermarket stringer and Oxford Business Group analyst.

Connect with David Houston-Hill at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhillwriter/.

More about David Houston-Hill:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/David-Hill/author/B0034OOGCC?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=a015be0c-bc83-4dee-b906-23d64934106c

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4799903.David_Hill

Summary of David's work published on the Northwest Translators' Association site:
https://www.notisnet.org/Blog/13556878

Summary of David's work published on Hungarian Literature Online:
https://hlo.hu/zoom/david-houston-hill-learning-singability-on-the-job.html

Profile on Twine:
https://www.twine.net/DavidHoustonHill

Profile on Soundbetter:
https://soundbetter.com/profiles/697347-david-houston-hill

This is one in a series of readings from The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje. Check out the whole series at:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvwToi1IG7tIbyOABfbjnvA

Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, this masterful, multi-award-winning book — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself.

In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May’s only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it’s labelled as ‘ghastly’ and ‘immoral’. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own.

In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May — both before and after her death — unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister’s letters; her biographers’ words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later.

In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death.


"Daanje works a deep literary vein that’s full of sly allusions . . . And there are sublime moments throughout, even when death comes into play . . . A challenging book that rewards its readers with great depth and beauty." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A significant and moving literary achievement, an unforgettable story of a historical mystery. . . McKay renders Daanje's distinct, rhythmic prose and character tones adroitly, alongside the atmospheric dread and luminous beauty that epitomizes her writing." —Elizabeth DeNoma, Shelf Awareness

Translator bio
David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. Born and educated in the United States, he has lived in and around The Hague since 1997.

Author bio
Anjet Daanje writes novels, short stories, and screenplays. Her breakthrough novel, The Remembered Soldier, won the Netherlands’ 2020 F. Bordewijk Prize and the Best Book of Groningen Prize. The Song of Stork and Dromedary won the 2023 Libris Literature Prize, the most prestigious award for Dutch literature, and the Boekenbon Prize, the Netherlands’ other major literary award — the first time that the Libris and Boekenbon prizes have been won by the same book. It has since been licensed in 13 languages and has sold over 100,000 copies in the Netherlands. Scribe has licensed North American rights in its edition to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Buy the book:
https://scribepublications.com.au/books/the-song-of-stork-and-dromedary
https://scribepublications.co.uk/books/the-song-of-stork-and-dromedary
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374620615/thesongofstorkanddromedary/

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When Anne’s father dies, she is left grieving a contradiction. Jean-Pierre was a man of many faces: the self-taught philosopher born into poverty; the Buddhist who marked favourite haikus with maple leaves; the old romantic who ends every evening kissing a pixelated portrait of his late wife; and the violent bully, whose alcoholism marks his family’s life in terrible ways. Sorting through his belongings and making funeral preparations, Anne tries to come to terms with who and what she’s lost.

Told with a quick wit and deep tenderness, Before I Forget is a tragicomic portrait of loss and a novel for anyone who’s ever loved a so-called monster.

‘A perfect strike: funny, emotional, political, and unflinchingly accurate.’ – Virginie Despentes

'There is a gorgeous tumbling present in these pages, a kind of slipperiness that presents itself in all the same ways we experience grief: pain and pleasure, joy and desperation. Before I Forget is a lovely ode to memory and trauma, but it's also a reminder that we hold so much love inside us that we can't help but inevitably leak and spill. Admirably brilliant work.' – Kristen Arnett

'Before I Forget... beautifully describes the claustrophobia and messiness of the grieving process... It’s darkly witty, so moving and can’t fail to stay with you.'– Service95

'A modest, beautiful tribute to death... From a subject that could descend into miserabilism, Anne Pauly produces a beautiful novel with burlesque moments.’– Elisabeth Philippe, L'Obs

'Humour and pain are always intertwined in this book, often in the same sentence.' – Oonagh Devitt Tremblay, Fallow

Translator bio
Dina Leifer is a London-based translator and writer. She switched career from journalism to translation in 2015 after gaining an MA in Translating Popular Culture. Dina’s first picture book, And Eddie Had an Egg, was published by Green Bean Books in 2025 after she won the 2023 UK Jewish Children’s Book Award. She won Stevns Translation Prize in 2025, and Before I Forget is her first translation of adult fiction.

Author bio
Anne Pauly is a writer working and living in Paris. Her first book, Avant que j'oublie, was awarded the 2020 Prix du Livre Inter and Prix Robert Walser, and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina, Prix Wepler, and Prix Goncourt. Anne has since written short stories for several reviews, a televised series, and a play. She is currently finishing a second novel, while working on a play for the Théâtre du Nord along with seven other writers, including Virginie Despentes, Paul B. Preciado, and Julien Delmaire.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.peirenepress.com/shop/books/before-i-forget/

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Ada d’Adamo is mother to Daria. Their days are absorbed by caregiving and routine. Daria’s profound needs remained undetected in pregnancy, and with her birth, Ada’s world is remade.

As a dancer she must use her physicality in new ways, to keep her daughter safe. As a writer she must find a language to communicate beyond words. And when, on the cusp of her fifties, Ada herself becomes gravely ill, she takes the most courageous decision of all: to leave Daria their story.

This is Gravity, a journey of isolation, anger and sometimes despair, through moments of joy and exquisite tenderness, towards a love stronger than life.

'A magnificent book. A wonderful dialogue between a mother and a daughter... A story like this belongs to everyone. It's a gift: in these cases we say thank you, and we smile.' La Repubblica Concita de Gregorio

'A book about pain is successful when it is also a book full of happiness. And when you read the first page, you understand that Come d'aira is a book that radiates happiness.' Corriere della Sera Paolo di Stefano

Translator bio
Alex Valente (he/him) is a bisexual bilingual Britalian on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land. He can be found in tiny writing on the credits page of books, when publishers remember to name the translator.

Author bio
Ada d’Adamo was an essayist and poet from Italy. After giving birth to her disabled daughter Aria, d’Adamo became an advocate for people with disabilities and for interabled families. While working on a memoir for her daughter, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She passed away on the 1st of April 2023. Three months later her memoir, Gravity, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award.

BUY THE BOOK: https://akoyapublishing.com/products/gravity

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Distant Signs: A Novel
by Anne Richter, translated by Douglas Irving, published in 2019 by Neem Tree Press.

Distant Signs is an intimate portrait of two families spanning three generations amidst turbulent political change, behind and beyond the Berlin Wall.

In 1960s East Germany, Margret, a professor’s daughter from the city, meets and marries Hans, from a small village in the Thuringian forest. The couple struggle to contend with their different backgrounds, and the emotional scars they bear from childhood in the aftermath of war. As East German history gradually unravels, with collision of the personal and political, acutely observed vignettes quietly reveal their two families’ hidden truths.

“I don't know that I've read a more moving piece of post-war German fiction - and this includes Günther Grass's best efforts.”

Misha, US Online Blog Tour Reviewer

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From the publisher (World Literature Today): “In this story of lengthy quarantine due to an unnamed virus, a woman sneaks into the mountain to collect ferns—many ferns. Simultaneously evoking life under past Chilean political oppression and living under recent worldwide quarantines due to Covid-19, this Cortazarian story marks the author’s English-language debut.”
Catalina Infante Beovic is a Chilean writer, publisher, journalist, and teacher. Follow Catalina on Instagram at @catalinainfantebeovic
Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish to English translator studying at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. Follow Michelle on Instagram at @mirabella_michelle and Twitter at @MirabellaM_

Find the story at:
English translation, published by World Literature Today in 2020: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/fiction/ferns-catalina-infante-beovic
Spanish, published by Neón Ediciones: https://www.librospatagonia.com/library/publication/helechos

Follow World Literature Today on Twitter at @worldlittoday.

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It’s 2007 and we are in Bilbao, worn out by the final blows of Basque terrorism. Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five year old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents. Meanwhile in Paris, Jokin struggles with his attraction to the mysterious Germana, yet, despite the distance, the twins’ lives seem destined to never separate and it will be a French writer’s novel that reconnects them.

The Melee is a polyphonic work; a world that connects reality to our most recondite dreams, a world where the only driving force seems to be blind violence. Can freedom reveal itself to be an instrument of torture, and can empathy that resists absolutism prevail in the face of trauma? Valentina Maini responds in the pages of this provocative debut and its web of stories connecting drug dealers, smugglers, psychiatrists, writers, cleaners and fortune tellers - and she does it with the conviction of Roberto Bolaño and Mathias Énard: looking chaos directly in the eye.

THE MELEE BY VALENTINA MAINI (PUBLISHED IN ITALIAN BY BOLLATI BORINGHIERI, 2020)

FIRST PLACE IN THE L'INDISCRETO QUALITY RANKINGS

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEVERINO CESARI DEBUT AWARD 2020

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FONDAZIONE MONDADORI DEBUT AWARD 2020

CHOSEN BY KOBO IN THEIR 50 BOOKS TO DEFY AND SURVIVE THE YEAR 2020

“What is great European literature today? The Melee by Valentina Maini has the range and complexity to fit the bill and the ambition to be part of it.”
VERONICA RAIMO (The Girl at the Door)

“There are writers who, more than make their debut, burst onto the scene. By writing novels that play havoc with all the rules. Valentina Maini is one of them.”
ANDREA BAJANI (If You Kept a Record of Sins; Every Promise)

“Redolent of Clarice Lispector and Roberto Bolano, a haunted, captivating, poetic novel that tells the story of two children of ETA and their quest for life and the future under the tight rein of a true artist and her unique, visionary freedom of language.”
MARTA BARONE (Città sommersa)

“In The Melee, Valentina Maini unfurls a notable variety of textual typologies – reports, statements, recordings, a novel within the novel – showing that it is still possible to tell stories in an impressive, original manner.”
WU MING 2 (Q; Manituana; 54)


Valentina Maini was born in Bologna in 1987. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature between Bologna and Paris and has published short stories in retabloid, TerraNullius, Atti Impuri, Horizonte, and other magazines. Some of her articles have appeared in Poetiche, La Deleuziana, and Classiques Garnier. With her collection of poetry, Casa Rotta (2016), she won the Anna Osti literary prize. She translates from French and from English into Italian.

Sean McDonagh is an emerging literary translator who translates from Italian. He is based in London where he works in publishing, and has been pursuing literary translation projects since participating in the Warwick Translates Summer School 2019. He has had a translation published on Asymptote, and as a poet has also had work published on Allegro, Rockland and Foxtrot Uniform. Sean has a BA in English, has lived and studied in Turin, and has completed an advanced course at the Italian Cultural Institute.

@seanpjamcdonagh (Twitter)
seanmcdonaghtranslator.com

For rights info, contact: Flavia Abbinante - flavia.abbinante@bollatiboringhieri.it
Rights Sold: Portuguese

The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.
TO READ A LONGER EXTRACT, please visit: seanmcdonaghtranslator.com/projects-seeking-a-publisher

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