Category: Silvia Rothlisberger

Live Event: FLAWA’s Poetics in Motion

Posted in Feminism, Indie press, Latin America, Literature, Live event, London event, Silvia RothlisbergerLeave a comment

I’m really happy to be curating some of the Literary events at this year’s FLAWA Festival (a festival in London dedicated to highlight the work of Latin American women artists).

Poetics in Motion Saturday 14 May 2022, 19:00 BST

Featuring poets Maia Elsner, Janel Pineda, Yvette Siegert, Sofía Vaisman who will be performing alongside open mic-ers; live music by the all-female bewitching Witchas!, and dance performance by the traditional dance group Somos Chibchas.

Open mic: Wish to share your own work on stage? Sign up on the night to enter your name into the open mic lucky dip draw – 6 slots 3 minutes each, selected at random.

Maia Elsner was born in London to Mexican and Polish Jewish parents. Her debut collection, overrun by wild boars (flipped eye, 2021), explores the dislocation of lives, communities, objects, and histories through migration and the legacies of colonisation. Most recently she has been involved in a film collaboration with Latin American artists across the diaspora, and in a poetry-postcard project that explores the refugee experience through troubling the line between verbal and visual arts.

Janel Pineda is a Los-Angeles born Salvadoran poet, educator, and the author of Lineage of Rain (Haymarket Books, 2021). Since her involvement with the 2018 Radical Roots Delegation, Pineda is also a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). She holds an MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently pursuing an MPhil in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Yvette Siegert is the author of Atmospheric Ghost Lights, selected for the 2021Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Award. Her debut collection, a winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize, explores the civil war in El Salvador and is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books. Shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry inTranslation.

Sofía Vaisman Maturana was born in Santiago, Chile 1993. Composer, poet, andmusic improviser. In 2019 awarded with the Victorina Press Poetry Awards (runner up), London. She currently publishes monthly chronicles of her experience as a boater for ‘Salvoconducta fanzine’ (Santiago, Chile).

Witchas! A music and arts collective based in London created by Latin Americanmigrant women and the daughters of Latin American migrants. They fusionBullerengue and other afro latin rhythms to create and experiment with new soundsand to inhabit cultural spaces usually dominated by male presence.

Somos Chibchas is a cultural association involving dance, music, visual arts and theater, focused on research, practice, preservation and diffusion of traditional Colombian culture and dances. Based on the study of old and new rhythms mostly focused on traditional dance movements and how they influence new dances developed for different genres of music.

Book tickets https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/latinx-poetics-in-motion-tickets-299056916287?fbclid=IwAR0Uv1qEtCqrmr4J8hUdro82a8W5loiqMehKiivOUZ-bnA0BJcFg7SFE8Uw

Podcast: Italian author & literary translator Claudia Durastanti

Posted in Author, Claudia Durastanti, Indie press, Interivew, Literature, Literature in translation, Podcast, Radio show, Silvia Rothlisberger, Translation, Women in translationTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

Claudia Durastanti is based in Rome, she has written four novels in Italian. She is co-founder of the Italian Literature Festival in London and is on the board of the Turin Book Fair. She is the Italian translator of Joshua Cohen, Donna Haraway, Ocean Vuong, and the most recent edition of The Great Gatsby. Two of Claudia’s novels have been translated into English: Cleopatra Goes to Prison, translated by Christine Donougher, and Strangers I Know translated by Elizabeth Harris.

Strangers I Know is Claudia’s fourth novel and the second one translated into English. A finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, Strangers I Know has been translated into twenty-one languages. It is a first-person account of an unconventional family. Where Both parents are deaf and have no sign language in common – which allows communications to be rife with misinterpretations. The narrator comes of age in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Strangers I Know is a profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.

Strangers I know is a novel, based on Claudia’s own family history. It is part autobiography, part mythology, part essay.

Podcast: Angolan author Ondjaki

Posted in Author, Indie press, Interivew, Literature in translation, Ondjaki, Radio show, Silvia Rothlisberger, TranslationTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

Ondjaki was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1977. He has written poetry, children’s books, short stories, novels, playwrights and film scripts. He has won major literary awards and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

 With a writing career spanning for two decades Ondjaki is the most prominent African writer of Portuguese from generations born after Portugal’s former colonies achieved independence in 1975.

Ondjaki’s latest book published in the UK is the award-winning Transparent City (translated by Stephen Henighan Europa editions UK 2021). Transparent City is a book set in Luanda,  through the life of the many people who inhabit a residential building Ondjaki depicts different perspectives of modern, capitalist, post-war Luanda.    

Ondjaki recently opened the bookshop Kiela Livraria in Luanda, started a publishing house, wrote and directed the film The Kitchen.  

Sound engineer: Oscar Perez.

Video: Andrea Jeftanovic and Karina Lickorish Quinn in Conversation

Posted in Author, Chile, Debut novel, Feminism, Interivew, Latin America, Latinx, Literature, Literature in translation, Peru, Silvia Rothlisberger, Theatre, Women in translationTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

Posted in Author, Chile, Feminism, Indie press, Interivew, Latin America, Literature, Literature in translation, Maternity in Literature, Podcast, Radio show, Silvia Rothlisberger, Translation, Women in translationTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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: Literary translator and author Jennifer Croft

Posted in Argentina, Author, Indie press, Interivew, Literature, Literature in translation, Olga Tokarczuk, Podcast, Radio show, Silvia Rothlisberger, Translation, Women in translationTagged , , , Leave a comment

Jennifer Croft is a translator, author and literary critic who works from Polish and Argentine Spanish. She was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights written by Olga Tokarczuk. Croft’s recent translations are a Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco (Charco Press), and The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal She is the author of the memoir Homesick, the novel in Spanish Serpientes y EScaleras ; the forthcoming novels Amadou, Fidelity and a book-length essay about Postcards.

Sound engineer: Oscar Perez.

Podcast: translator and author Jessica Sequeira

Posted in Argentina, Author, Chile, Interivew, Latin America, Literature, Literature in translation, Podcast, Silvia Rothlisberger, Translation, Women in translationTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

Book review: Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz (trans. Annie McDermott & Carolina Orloff)

Posted in Argentina, Author, Book Review, Indie press, Latin America, Literature, Maternity in Literature, Silvia Rothlisberger, TheatreTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Silvia Rothlisberger

Feebleminded is narrated with an intense and fragmented prose characteristic of Ariana Harwicz (Argentina, 1977). It is the second book of what Harwicz calls an “involuntary trilogy” where she explores motherhood, how it affects the characters psychically, and how it sways their desires. Divided in three parts and with only 117 pages Feebleminded is a bold and superb short novel that confronts the impossible parameters society has set for women.

In the book, a woman in her late 20s lives with her toxic and alcoholic mother. They are more like two best friends than mother and daughter. Their house is a creepy place with wigs hanging up and mice in jars of formaldehyde. We learn about the daughter’s neglected childhood through feverish memories unveiled in conversations and internal monologues. Memories as far in the past as when she was conceived (“the guy comes inside my mum looking skyward and so it all begins”), or from one night when she was in her mother’s womb and the mum threw dice to decide if she’d get rid of the unknown creature inside her.

The pace of the novel is like a staccato: short punchy sentences where there is an intensity, a heaviness; only with short sentences can this roller-coaster of a book be bearable. We follow the story through dialogues where you don’t know if it’s the mother or the daughter talking. Other times the dialogue is internal. We feel their madness, their constant delirium in each phrase, or as the daughter says: “I’m not crazy, just possessed”.

The daughter is in a relationship with a married man who leaves her because his wife is pregnant. She feels angry — “it was the other common bitch who got him”, she thinks. She wishes for the baby to be born dead, or to be a Siamese twin stuck to a dog. But when her mum learns about this, she has a more sinister plan of revenge.

The two women are marginalised, they are maladaptive, they are happy in a very disturbing way. They have relationships with impossible men. They fantasise about men coming to their house to rape them. They drink whisky, talk about sex and masturbate in an insatiable way. From the opening paragraph —each chapter is one long paragraph— when we are getting to know them: “sitting on my clit I invent a life for myself in the clouds. I quiver, I shake, my fingers are my morphine and for that brief moment everything’s fine”.

They are verbally and physically violent to each other. Sometimes the daughter wishes for a different life. “If I could only have started a new chapter elsewhere… say bye to mum without fearing the crack of a fired arrow”. Yet, they are inseparable. At the end of part I, the mother has left and the daughter is searching for her. At the end of part II, it is the daughter who leaves the mother.  But they both return. At times they are tired of life, but most times they can’t get enough of it. At the end of part III they are crawling on hands and knees, covered in blood: “let it all explode, let it all turn to dust, says mother, still wanting more.”

Translated into English by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff, from its original in Spanish La Debil Mental, reading this book is an intense deranged tension that only a writer like Ariana Harwicz, who wants to transgress with her work, can achieve.

Harwicz’s main characters – at least in this trilogy – are women searching for who they are in a world that is telling them how they should be. The first book of this trilogy Die, My Love is similarly a sharp book about a marginalised woman who lives with her husband and unwanted baby. It was nominated for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, and for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, placing Ariana Harwicz at the forefront of the so-called new Argentinian fiction.

* I’ll be talking with Ariana Harwicz and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara in an online event on 3 June 2020 7pm (UK time), Find out more HERE!

Against literary machismo in Latin America

Posted in #Metoo, Feminism, Literature, Silvia Rothlisberger, UncategorizedTagged , , , Leave a comment

Silvia Rothlisberger

A manifesto signed by hundreds of Latin American female and male writers from the region raises awareness of the gender disparity in most of the cultural and literary events in Latin America and of the machismo culture that reigns in the industry.

The most recent example and the one that encouraged this manifesto was The III Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Biennale, which took place on the last week of May in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Biennale awards a Latin American author with US $100,000 and is named after the most recent Nobel Prize winner from the region Mario Vargas Llosa who stirred things up on March 2018 after writing in the Spanish-language newspaper El País that nowadays feminism is the biggest enemy of literature as “it pretends to decontaminate it from misogyny, prejudice and immorality”.

The scarce female presence on this year’s Mario Vargas Llosa Biennale couldn’t be ignored: from the 16 panellists only three were women, from the five shortlisted authors of the literary award only one was a woman. And from the five judges of the prize only one was a woman.

“This year is not different from past years”, states the manifesto. “In 2014 the panellists were 25 men and only six women; in 2015: 22 men and eight women,” it continues. “And in both editions, the panel of judges and the shortlisted authors for the award were equally disproportionate. Also, on both occasions the winners were male. We can guess what gender will be this year’s winner.” As if predicting the near future the winner of the III Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Biennale Award was a male writer.

The Manifesto also raises awareness of the machismo culture in the literary industry. After a scandal that broke on Mexico at the end of March when a journalist denounced on Twitter that a male writer had physically harmed many women and they were afraid to speak up. This unveiled a wave of testimonies of harassment via Twitter from personal accounts under the hashtag #MetooEscritoresMexicanos (#MetooMexicanWriters) and there is now a Twitter account called @MeTooEscritores where women can send their testimonies and they are published on this account. If they want to remain anonymous they can.

#metooescritoresmexicanos (also known as #MujeresjuntasMarabunta) is now a movement and their manifesto states: “In the last couple of weeks, more and more women working in publishing have joined in a collective and subversive action against violence that has been normalized in our workspaces: publishing houses, book fairs, conferences, congresses, universities, workshops, etc. This is not new. We have kept harassment, humiliation, segregation and sexual assault to ourselves far too long, in fear that our accusations would be dismissed and our work excluded.” The manifesto also states how their “mission is to underscore impunity, which in Mexico stands at an alarming rate of 95% -an absolute imbalance of power that benefits perpetrators”.

The movement has ten demands as an initial stage to stop the harassment and gender imparity. To highlight a few: That the development of public policy guarantee gender parity in the different levels of cultural institutions, as well as in juries and selection committees for all state and national contests. That all publicly funded magazines and publications include at least 50% of female authors in their catalogue. That there be an alternation between men and women in decision-making positions.

This movement in Mexico is the latest of an increasing number of feminist movements in the literary sphere throughout Latin America that wants to change the industry into a more balanced and fair environment for women.

Comando Plath is a collective from Peru of women writers, artists and intellectuals who are tired of being “stereotyped, ignored, treated violently and being ridiculed”. The collective Comando Plath created a successful petition on Change.org asking the president of Peru to withdraw the National poetry award given to the poet Reynaldo Naranjo. This petition came after an award winning investigation by journalists Gabriella Wiener and Diego Salazar exposed the laureate poet of sexually abusing his daughter and stepdaughter in the 70s.

#EscribimosPublicamosExistimos | #Colombiatieneescritoras

 

Photo: Katherine Hanlon