You know when you love a TV show so much that you want to recommend books for all the characters to read? You do, right, it’s not just me? That’s what happened with BBC’s brand new drama series This Town, set in the West Midlands in 1981 as riots rage and a band forms, inspired by the 2Tone spirit and the Thatcherite shite going on around them. A bunch of youngsters and their families are embroiled in the politics of the day, largely Northern Ireland-related. And the soundtrack is a treat. Some singing along occurred. So here come the V&Q book picks for almost all the main characters in Th ..read more

The last London Book Fair I attended was in 2019. In 2020 I was all set to fly over and take on the role of “translator of the fair”, with a poster-sized photo of me up outside the Olympia venue and events lined up – when the fair was rightly cancelled. There wasn’t an in-person version in 2021, in 2022 I got Covid just before leaving, and in 2023 I was too stressed and hunkered down in Dublin instead. As you can imagine, this year I was absolutely delighted to see what felt like hundreds of people – mainly translators – who I hadn’t seen in the flesh for five years. But before that came the A ..read more

Translators have been concerned about technology since St Jerome stubbed a toe on a newfangled scroll. Actually, though, there are some ways in which it has done us good. Although I still own a barrage of paper dictionaries, I no longer work with a big fat yellow book open on my lap and I enjoy the flexibility that online research offers me. More technical translators have adapted to using new technologies like CAT tools and machine translation software, and as long as demand was increasing we rarely saw the march of progress as a problem. Now, however, generative AI is threatening translators ..read more

The German-language literary magazine landscape is beset by similar challenges as the Anglophone one: funding is hard to find, energy is finite, so projects tend to peter out after a while. I took a trawl through the German-language litmags listed at Literaturport and noticed that a good few of them have folded since Covid, sadly. Most of the longstanding journals here have an affiliation to either a creative writing school – like Edit from Leipzig and BELLA Triste from Hildesheim, both great places for discovering new writers – or larger publishing houses. Some of them go back decades, and ma ..read more

A review by Katy Derbyshire Dilek Güngör’s latest book launched a fortnight ago at a packed Berlin event, where the love flowing back and forth between the stage and the audience was palpable. Dilek – full disclosure: I think we’re friends, we’ve definitely been for a coffee together and I’ve translated an essay she wrote, as yet unpublished – talked about how her latest protagonist Ada is once again very like her but not identical. The audience swooned at that, since Dilek is eminently likeable. But as she read and talked, we learned that Ada wants everyone to like her and then yet again, she ..read more

You know when a character in a comic wears a band T-shirt and you know the musicians personally? Maybe not – I guess it doesn’t come up all that often. But that’s what happened to me when I first read RUDE GIRL, Birgit Weyhe’s graphic novel telling Priscilla Layne’s story. There it is, on page 264 – a Mother’s Pride T-shirt. The first thing I did was take a photo and send it to the former singer, who went out and bought a couple of copies of the German original. The second was to think: Would people want to read this in English? Back to the comic itself: the author and artist Birgit Weyhe lik ..read more

Next up in our series of translators’ tips from the wealth of German books in 2023 is the translator and literary scout Alex Roesch. German literature in 2023 has proven to be a year dominated by the distinct voices of talented women. My top picks offer up a trio of perspectives on life, identity and resilience written by women, and a fourth rather unusual title for good measure by a male author. First up is Maike Wetzel’s Schwebende Brücken (Schöffling), a story that captivated me from the first page and stuck with me as the most poignant read of the year. The story, set in contemporary Berl ..read more

The Dublin Literary Award today announced its 70-strong longlist of titles nominated by 80 libraries around the world for the 2024 prize. Honouring excellence in world literature, it is one of very few awards that covers both translated and original English fiction. And we’re delighted that V&Q Books’ very own Identitti, written by Mithu Sanyal and translated by Alta L. Price, is in the running! With a big fat purse of €100,000 for the winning team or sole writer, the prize is highly coveted. Last year’s winners were the German author Katja Oskamp and her translator Jo Heinrich, who were d ..read more

…and a couple to look out for in 2024 By Jamie Bulloch We’re rounding out the year with a few different translators’ recommendations. Here comes the first, by the historian and translator Jamie Bulloch – enjoy! Those who know my tepid enthusiasm for autofiction might raise an eyebrow at my choice of German books for 2023, all three of which belong to this genre. Have I, perhaps, become a convert? Wolf Haas: Property The first of these is Wolf Haas’s Eigentum (Hanser). With the narrator’s ninety-five-year-old mother on her deathbed, he sets himself the task of writing her life story before her ..read more

A review by Katy Derbyshire I’m a major fan of the writer Irina Liebmann, especially her dogged devotion to one particular street in Berlin, about which more in a later post. The very first of her books that I read, however, was Berliner Mietshaus. It has been extremely cold in Berlin lately, the kind of weather that requires you to curl up near a heat source with a familiar book, and this was that old favourite. The premise is simple enough: In 1979, Irina Liebmann chose one building in the East Berlin borough of Prenzlauer Berg and interviewed everybody living in it, then wrote down what the ..read more