International Readings in Norwich

The Curve and Fusion space in The Forum, Norwich
Sat 20th, Mon 22nd, Tues 23rd, Thurs 25th June 2009

All events take place from 5 – 6pm and are FREE. No need to book.

Dip into the world of international writing with this set of readings taking place as part of our Worlds literary festival. These  free readings provide a rare glimpse of the thriving writing scene emerging from India, the United States, Belgium, China, Mexico and the UK.

Adam Thorpe reading at Worlds 08. Photography: Martin Figura

Saturday 20th June, International Readings

With Carmen Boullosa, Psiche Hughes, Ambai and Lakshmi Holmstrom. This event also launches our Norfolk wide set of readings and workshops, Worlds in Translation which is supported by BCLT (The British Centre for Literary Translation).

Monday 22nd June,  International Poetry @ The Curve, The Forum

A chance to hear the diverse and contrasting styles of Indian and UK poetry with readings from John McAuliffe, co-director of the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, prolific poet and novelist Priya Sarukkai-Chabria, Rebecca Swift, co-founder of The Literary Consultancy and Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi.

Tuesday 23rd June, The International Novel @ Fusion in The Forum

Readings from international novelists, with talented contemporary writer Jill Dawson, whose work has been widely translated, Sharmistha Mohanty, author of two novels and scriptwriter for Indian Cinema and Chika Unigwe, an Afro-Belgian writer of Nigerian origin whose second novel, Fata Morgana, was published in Dutch in 2008 and will soon be released in English.

Thursday 25th June, International Writing @ Fusion in The Forum

Poet Vivek Narayanan (India), translator of contemporary French poetry Cole Swensen (US), poet, novelist and filmmaker Zhu Wen (China) and Julia Lovell, translator of contemporary Chinese fiction offer a mixture of stimulating international poetry and prose.

Please scroll down for writer biographies.

Free Readings around Norfolk

Mimi Khalvati reading at Worlds 08. Photography: Martin Figura

Worlds in Translation 20 – 25 June 2009

Come and meet new writers in Norwich, Cromer, Dereham and  North Walsham. Take the opportunity to meet the writer, join an informal workshop – no foreign language skills or creative writing experience are required – discuss their work and consider how work changes as it is translated. All featured books are available to borrow through Norfolk libraries prior to the event; please get in touch with your local library (details below).

All events are free but places on workshops  must be reserved in advance by calling the library concerned.

The events below have been arranged by the British Centre for Literary Translation as part of the Worlds Literary festival.

Saturday 20 June
Carmen Boullosa, Psiche Hughes, Ambai and Lakshmi Holmstrom: Worlds in Translation Launch
The Forum, Norwich
5pm-6pm

Writers’ Centre Norwich International readings are also taking place in The Forum, Norwich from 20-25 June.

Monday 22 June
Carmen Boullosa, Psiche Hughes and Amanda Hopkinson
Cromer Library, Prince of Wales Road, Cromer,
6.00pm: Reading and discussion featuring Leaving Tabasco (Grove Atlantic)
7.30pm: Translation workshop
Advance booking essential: (Maria Pavledis 01263 512850)

Tuesday 23 June
Zhu Wen and Julia Lovell
Dereham Library, 59 High Street, Dereham, Norfolk
2pm: Translation workshop
7.30pm: Reading and discussion featuring I  Love Dollars (Penguin)
Advance Booking essential (Brigitte Morton 01362 693184)

Wednesday 24 June
Ambai and Lakshmi Holmstrom
North Walsham Library, New Road, North Walsham
2pm: Reading and discussion featuring In a Forest, A Deer (OUP India)
3.30pm:  Translation workshop
Advance Booking essential: (Stephanie Witham 01692 402482)

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Rukmini Nair

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1982 and a second honoris causa degree in 2006 from the University of Antwerp for her work in the areas of linguistics, cognition, narrative and literary theory.  She has been Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Stanford University and the University of Washington at Seattle, as well as a Fellow of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences at Cambridge.
In 1990, Nair got the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition and in 2000 was selected as a ‘Face of the Millennium’ in a national survey of writers. Called ‘the first significant post-modern poet in Indian English’, she is currently working on a fourth volume of poems, Shataka – on the Mumbai terror attack – inspired by the work of the 6th century Sanskrit grammarian-poet, Bhartrhari.
As the editor of Biblio, an Indian review journal which William Dalrymple has said ‘compares in many ways favourably with the TLS and THES’, she is part of the Australian Radio National’s panel of experts for its ‘Book Show’ programme. In addition, she contributes to major national dailies and magazines, is on the editorial boards of several academic journals and is a frequent panellist on Mark Tully’s BBC broadcast ‘Something Understood’.

Psiche Hughes

Psiche Hughes was born in Argentina and lives in London. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’ s poetry collection  Jump of the Mantra Ray is published by The Old Press, and illustrated by Philip Hughes. She is taking part in the Worlds in Translation programme, which is managed by BCLT.

Amanda Hopkinson is a literary translator, most recently of Paulo Coelho [The Devil and Miss Prym] and Ricardo Piglia [Money to Burn], as well as numerous shorter works for anthologies and websites. She also writes books on photography, preferably either historical or Latin American, most recently the monographs on the first professionally recognised Amerindian photographer, Martin Chambi; and on the Mexican modernist, Manuel Alvarez Bravo. She has also contributed extensively to the forthcoming Oxford Book of the Photograph and the New Dictionary of National Biography.

Carmen Boullosa

Carmen Boullosa (Mexico City, 1954) has published fifteen novels, the most recent La virgen y el violín and El complot de los románticos at Editorial Siruela (They´re Cows, We’re Pigs, Leaving Tabasco and Cleopatra Dismounts).  She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and has won prizes and held fellowships across the world. She lives in Brooklyn and is the host of the T.V. show Nueva York, which has just been awarded an EMMY.

Ambai

Ambai is a Tamil writer. Her translated stories have been published in two collections entitled A Purple Sea and In a Forest, A Deer. She is also an independent researcher in Women’s Studies for the past thirty years and has several publications to her credit. She is currently the Director of SPARROW.

Lakshmi Holmstrom

Lakshmi Holmström is a writer and translator who has translates short stories and novels by major contemporary writers in Tamil. Two of her books will be published in 2009: The rapids of a great river: the Penguin book of Tamil poetry, of which she is a co-editor; and Midnight tales, a translation of a novel by Salma.  She was a Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at the UEA and has received many awards for her work.

John McAuliffe

John McAuliffe has published two collections, A Better Life (The Gallery Press), which was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Award in 2002, and Next Door (The Gallery Press 2007). He now lives in Manchester where he co-directs the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s publications include the poetry collections Not Springtime Yet ( 2008, HarperCollins) and Dialogue and Other Poems (Indian Academy of Literature 2005, reprint 2006) , the novels Generation 14 (2008, Penguin-Zubaan) and The Other Garden (1995, Rupa&Co). She is currently translating the erotic poetry of  the 8th century Tamil woman saint-poet Aandaal.

Rebecca Swift co-founded The Literary Consultancy of which she is currently Director.  Rebecca has appeared at numerous literary festivals and on many panels both in the UK and overseas. She is a trustee of Writers’ Centre Norwich and the Maya Centre, as well as a member of the Free Word Consortium.

Jill Dawson

Jill Dawson is the author of six novels and editor of six anthologies.
She has received many awards for her work, including twice been nominated for the Orange Prize for fiction. Her latest novel, The Great Lover about the poet Rupert Brooke, has been widely acclaimed and described by the Daily Mail as ‘exceptional, even by prize-winning Dawson’s standards’.  She was the Creative Writing Fellow at UEA in 2003 and received an Honorary doctorate in 2006.

Sharmistha Mohanty

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One and New Life. Her translation of Tagore’s fiction, Broken Nest and Other Stories is due out in June. Mohanty’s work has appeared in journals and magazines in India, USA, UK and France. Mohanty is the founder editor of the online literature journal Almost Island, and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers meet in New Delhi. She lives in Bombay.

Chika Unigwe

Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu. She lives in Belgium. Her novel, On Black Sisters’ Street will be published by Jonathan Cape in July, 2009. She has won several literary prizes and has published short stories and essays in several journals and anthologies. She was a 2008 UNESCO fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Centre and a 2009 Rockefeller Fellow at the Bellagio Centre in Italy. She is working on a new novel.

Vivek Narayanan taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and moved back to India in 2000. His first book of poems, Universal Beach, was published in 2006 by Harbour Line Press in Mumbai. Narayanan is Consulting Editor for the online experimental literary journal, Almost Island, Associate Editor for the Boston-based poetry annual, Fulcrum, and works in Delhi at Sarai-CSDS, an organization that brings together visual artists, social scientists, creative writers, public intellectuals and others to reflect on new and old media forms and the contemporary global city.

Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, most recently Ours (University of California Press, 2008), which is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, is a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism and is the founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets, and the co-director of the annual Reid Hall Translation Seminar in Paris.

Zhu Wen

Zhu Wen is one of the most influential writers in contemporary China. His works have been selected into university literature textbook and translated into various languages. The English version of I Love Dollars was shortlisted into the Kiriyama Prize in 2008. He started his film career as a director in 2001. The film debut Seafood (scriptwriter, director) got the Jury Special Award in 58th Venice International Film Festival, the Best Director award in 23rd Nates 3 Continental Film Festival etc. In 2009 he finished his third film Thomas Mao.

Julia Lovell. Photography: Piers Allardyce

Julia Lovell has translated several works of modern and contemporary Chinese fiction, including Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang, A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong, Serve the People by Yan Lianke and I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen. Her translation of the complete fiction of Lu Xun will be published by Penguin Classics later this year. A lecturer in Chinese history at the University of London, she is also the author of The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC to AD 2000 and The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature. She is currently working on a new history of the Sino-British Opium War and its afterlives in modern China, to be published by Picador in 2010. She lives in Cambridge.