Tuesday 7th January 2020, 7pm, Gay’s the Word, WC1N 1AB London Join translator and queer ally Dr. Stephanie Schechner for a celebration of the life and works of Mireille Best (1943–2005), a working-class French lesbian author whose brilliant contributions to LGBTQ+ fiction are yet to be fully ap
Oh you girls, weary of silence and the night,Can we, in this dark land, believeIn the false moon that hangs beyond the window?Or read poems by the faint lightOf this despairing star?As if I were already dead,The words do not believe my voice.As if I were already dead, my voiceNo longer fills these s
By morningmy fingers were stubbed like chalk stickworn writingall nightlong love poemsacross the walls of your houseImbued with a deep silence tooand a heavy insult,that happenedto beI love you…Therein the courtyardsits a little pool of rainTherewhere no one saw uswe lovedeach otherstandingandbare
We are a Berlin-based NGO called WIR MACHEN DAS (‘we are doing it’) and in 2017 we asked authors who had come to Germany from war and crisis zones what we could do for them. The answer we heard most often was ‘Weiter Schreiben’ – literally ‘to write on’: they wanted the opportunity to
It all began when our literature team at the Deutsche Welle asked ourselves the question: why are so few German-language writers translated into English? Exploring this question further, we ended up with a list: 100 German-language books, written between 1901 and today, that are available in English
‘Actually, don’t tell anyone else about the idea. We’d like some time to think about it.’ Imagine the scene: I was at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, talking to Leif Greinus from the German publishing house Voland & Quist, perched on stools at their stylish black booth on the ‘Islan
