Video: Andrea Jeftanovic and Karina Lickorish Quinn in Conversation

This talk was recorded during the London Spanish Book Fair

Chilean author Andrea Jeftanovic and Peruvian-British author Karina Lickorish talk about their debut novels Theatre of War (translated by Frances Riddle, Charco Press 2020) and The Dust Never Settles (Oneworld Publications 2021).

“A debut novel is a piece of the writer’s soul in a way that subsequent books can’t ever be” wrote authorAyana Mathis. In this talk Jeftanovic and Lickorish explore how their debut novels came into being, from the history of their countries to the ghosts of their past and the overlapping themes that connect them: memory, trauma, spectrality, the intersection of the domestic and the political.

Karina Lickorish Quinn is a Peruvian-British writer and a lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her short prose has been published widely including in Wasafiri, The Offing, Palabritas, and the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. She was featured in Un Nuevo Sol, the first major anthology of British-Latinx writers. Her debut novel The Dust Never Settles will be published by Oneworld Publications in October 2021 and in Spanish as El Polvo Nunca se Asienta by Editorial Arde in 2022. Karina is represented by Seren Adams at United Agents. 

Andrea Jeftanovic is a Chilean writer. Born in Santiago in 1970, she is the author of the novels Escenario de Guerra (2000) and Geografía de la lengua (Love in a Foreign Language, 2007), and of two volumes of short stories: No aceptes caramelos de extraños (Don’t Take Candy from Strangers, 2013) and Destinos errantes (2016). Of Jewish and Serbian ancestry, Jeftanovic grew up among three religions – Russian Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish. She studied sociology at the Catholic University in Santiago de Chile and in 2005 she finished a PhD in Latin American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Dust Never Settles by Karina Lickorish Quinn
Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic (translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle)

Podcast: Literary translator Sophie Hughes

Sophie Hughes has translated such Latin American writers as Alia Trabucco Zerán, Laia Jufresa, Brenda Navarro, Guadalupe Nettel, and Fernanda Melchor. She is the recipient of grants from PEN/Heim in the US, and the Arts Council and Arts Foundation in the UK. Her recent translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award in Translation and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. 

Sophie has also worked with the Stephen Spender Trust promoting translation in schools and is the co-editor of the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe.

Podcast: translator and author Jessica Sequeira

Jessica Sequeira is the author of A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), the collection of stories Rhombus and Oval (What Books), the collection of essays Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero), and her most recent book A Luminous History of the Palm (Sublunary Editions). Jessica has translated poetry and prose by Latin American authors, both contemporaries as well as figures such as Winétt de Rokha, Sara Gallardo, and Teresa Wilms Montt. Most recently she translated a biography of the Chilean artist Delia del Carril Iraeta. Jessica is associate editor of Sublunary editions and is currently doing a PhD at the Centre of Latin American Studies, in Cambridge, on literary exchanges between Latin America and India.

Mentioned in this episode:

Books:

Music:

Harry Beckett

Los Tetas

Miss Garrison

Sound engineer: Oscar Perez.