Our monthly news roundup about Asymptote’s international team continues with more from our busy editors. Here’s what they’ve been up to recently.
Paris Review Daily hosted a week of selections from contributing editor Adrian West’s forthcoming translation of Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Links to all five excerpts can be found on Adrian’s Josef Winkler page here. The Times Literary Supplement published a glowing review of his translation of Josef Winkler’s When the Time Comes in their January 10 issue. Also, Adrian’s translation of Josef Winkler’s Natura Morta, extracts of which premiered in Asymptote in April 2012, has just been published by Contra Mundum Press.
Drama editor Caridad Svich’s play In the Time of the Butterflies, based on the novel by Julia Alvarez, has its English language premiere at San Diego Repertory Theatre in San Diego, CA under Todd Salovey and Herbert Siguenza’s direction, January 4-26, 2014.
The novel Trieste by Daša Drndić, translated by contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac, is coming out in the United States on January 15 with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It was published last year in England by Maclehose Press and was shortlisted for the International Foreign Fiction Prize.
Farzaneh Doosti, Iran editor-at-large, has published the first translation into Persian of Joseph Conrad’s Freya of the Seven Isles. Her translation of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room will be released in the classic novella series by the same Persian publisher. She is also working on the online journal and database Parsagon: The Paragon of Persian Literature and Arts Today, which aims to introduce and promote the best Persian works and literary figures to the world. Last but not least, she has just finished translating a basic book on Traditional Chinese Paintings to Persian in collaboration with a Chinese arts expert, a first step towards the introduction of this topic in Iran.
January 31st, senior editor Florian Duijsens will host a Dialogue Books reading and Q&A with author Luisa Weiss (aka The Wednesday Chef!) at Berlin’s Soho House to celebrate the release of the German translation of her My Berlin Kitchen. Click here for more info and to RSVP.
Nonfiction editor Joshua Craze published a long essay on life in Juba, South Sudan, “Dreams Are Not Made of Concrete,” in Fourth Genre, and an essay on witnessing and forensics in the fall edition of Onsite Review. An essay he wrote on conceptions of territory in Sudan was published in the edited collection, The Borderlands of South Sudan. As a journalist, he published a series of articles on the crisis in the Sudanese borderlands, and on The Waste Books, his website, he excerpted from a collaborative book he is currently writing with his father, On Passage.
Assistant editor Julia Sanches won the Birkbeck & And Other Stories sample translation competition in the Portuguese language category.
Simon Morley, visual editor, will have a solo exhibition titled “Book-Paintings” at Artsonje Lounge Project, Seoul, 7 March – 30 March 2014.
Sohini Basak, intern, was declared the second-place winner of the RaedLeaf Poetry Prize and was awarded the Certificate of Excellence for three of her poems in the Long Poems category. The prize is an all-India poetry prize in their inaugural year hosted by the RaedLeaf Poetry India and was judged by Arundhati Subramanium, Inua Ellams, Ram Krishna Singh and Ranjit Hoskote. Read one of her winning poems here.