It’s La Grande Rentree for all bibliophiles and we’ll be celebrating with a French Riveting Reviews special this month. Publication is on our website on September 14. The deadline for our October monthly online Reviews is 19th October, with the wonderful West Camel editing and officiating.
If you didn’t get your festival fix over the summer in Edinburgh, at the BBC Proms, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (my personal summer favourites!), or at any of those other wonderful arts festivals across the UK, then you have an autumn feast ahead of you. From now until next summer, from Cheltenham to Hay, my festival feet will hardly touch the ground: hosting, writing, reviewing, listening, learning, debating, feeding my brain. Perusing the autumn book brochures and programmes, I am delighted to see that translation and international authors are these days featured at the majority of festivals. That’s in spite of Brexit and debacles over visas. We are more international in our reading. We have become a festival nation, from the big beasts and literary stars to the smaller, local innovative start-ups. They all need your support though, large and small. They all need audiences and readers. Highly recommended by us here at European Literature Network, taking place from September to October, are Marlborough, Birmingham, North Cornwall, Cheltenham, London, Manchester, Ilkley, Jersey, Isle of Wightand Durham. Their websites provide all the necessary information.
On other matters: we have been awarded another Arts Council Englandgrant for which we are immensely grateful. It means we can support you, keep the European Literature Network going and retain our dedicated team Anna Blasiak and West Camel. The high standard of work they consistently perform for so little reward is admirable: thank you to them both, and to Max Easterman who keeps the books balanced.
It’s also full steam ahead for our Literally Swiss and 12 Swiss Booksprojects with the Swiss Arts Council/Pro Helvetia. If you’d like to get involved or find out more about any of our projects, do get in touch. The Swiss Riveter will be our next print edition in December, launched at our big Swiss translation workshop and Swiss Literature event at the British Library on December 5th.
To celebrate our new ACE grant, we will be updating and revising our website. Watch this space and please continue to contribute reviews, blogs and other news. I am particularly keen to run more blogs from all of you, reporting on your events, festivals, books, translation experiences, and so on. For example, Ruth Kemp will be blogging about “WorldKidliterature” this September and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese wrote in August about “Transreading the Baltics”. 500 words max for blogs please. Pictures always welcome. Tweets and Facebook-sharing too please. For all else please contact us via our website. We’ve also run some wonderful Summer #RivetingReads over the past few months – do keep your recommendations for new books in English translation coming in. We can make this a regular online event.
Before you fill your autumn diaries though don’t forget the deadline for applying for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme 2018, with the National Writers Centre in Norwich. Then there’s International Translation Day on 28th September at Freeword Centre and the new Bookblast initiative launched on 11th September. More info in our calendar. This month we’ll also be holding our first judges meeting for the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize (deadline for submissions is November 1st) and I’m delighted to welcome Ted Hodgkinson, Samantha Schnee and Gabriel Gbadamosi to my judging panel.
Do put September 20th, 2018 in your diaries for our next European Literature Network meeting, at Europe House in London. Then December 3rd for both a SWISS networking meeting in the afternoon and EUROPEAN meeting in the evening. See you soon.