Ofcourse I love the Eurovision Song Contest! Who doesn’t? Especially this year, with the UK and Ukraine sharing top billing. I love the glitter and extravagance – and love the fact that several bookshops, publishers and festivals are making the most of this year’s contest to release their Eurovision BOOK favourites from the 37 competing countries. Here are just two Eurolit links – from PRH Penguin and from the Hay-on-Wye Festival.
As the only network of European literature and translation in the UK, ELNet is also jumping on the Eurovision bandwagon to tell you about our first European Writers’ Festival which takes place in London the weekend after Eurovision, 20th and 21st May; ELNet in collaboration with the British Library and EUNIC London. Click here for tickets. It would be great if our Writers’ festival also attracted an audience of 160 million (!), and even greater if we were able to access even a fraction of the Eurovision budget (!), but we are managing to host nearly 30 prize-winning authors from all over Europe and our Eurovision literary passion and commitment are equally strong. Do join us and make this a festival to remember – and, we hope, to stage every year. Just like Eurovision!
In other matters, we’ve been rather busy, launching not one but two Riveter magazines, to great acclaim and to packed out events at London Book Fair, the British Library, the Austrian Cultural Forum London and the Cervantes Institute London. Enormous thanks to all our sponsors, our contributors and the ELNet team. You’ll be pleased to know that we made a video of The Spanish Riveter launch at the British Library – see here, and on our YouTube channel.An interview with Rosa Montero will be posted next week. Artist Ian Long has also done some wonderful sketches of the performers at The Spanish Riveter launch – see here on our website.If you couldn’t get hold of a print copy, you are welcome to download both magazines as PDFs for free here on our website: The Spanish Riveter and The Austrian Riveter.
To ensure that we create maximum impact with each magazine, we are also posting each article individually on our website – there is so much content we will have enough for several months! Additionally, if anyone who’d like to order print copies of the magazines to be posted to them, we have an arrangement with NEWSSTAND – you only pay Postage and Packing. The online BOOKSHOP.ORG has special sections dedicated to both Austrian and Spanish books under ‘European Literature Network’.
Many of you have asked, what next for The Riveter magazines and the European Literature Network? Sadly, without further grants or funding, there can be no more magazines. However, we will keep the ELNet website going on a voluntary basis (as we’ve been doing since Brexit and since losing our ACE and Creative Europe grants). We will publish #RivetingReviews once a quarter, starting again in September (contact: reviews@eurolitnetwork.com), and we’ll continue our blogs, Poetry Travels by Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo, La Española, written by Alice Banks, The Italianist, with Alex Valente, and a new blog, Die Germanistin, penned by Sheridan Marshall – all appearing on our website at regular intervals. Our general contact address is, as always, contact@eurolitnetwork.com. We will ofcourse continue to collaborate with our partners at events and festivals, as we’re doing this month at the European Writers’ Festival – look out for me in my red sequinned trouser suit, my homage to Eurovision! Perhaps, the sponsors of the Eurovision Song Contest will shine their glitter balls in our direction. Douze points and a couple of lucrative contracts will do very nicely.
Love, Rosie The Riveter
Director of the European Literature Network
Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter magazines