Hey guys, happy Friday!
We frequently report happy awards-news (and don’t worry, we’ve got a bit this week, too). But unhappy literary awards news? Forget about it—until now. South Korean Man Asian Book Prize-winner Shin Kyung-Sook has (sort of) admitted to pilfering passages from Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s work. Apparently, she “can’t trust her own memory” on the issue. Hm. And speaking of South Korean bestsellers—apparently the Talmud is a hot-ticket bestseller right now.
We’ve spoken about the buzz surrounding Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s Prix Goncourt-winning (originally French-language, recently translated into English by John Cullen) The Meursault Investigation, itself a riff on Albert Camus’ legendary The Stranger—here’s another great review at NPR. Speaking of literary rivalries/riffs, here’s what Irish writer playwright George Bernhard Shaw thought of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
We promised it, you’ve got it now: awards info. After winning the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, it’s hardly surprising that Susan Bernofsky similarly snagged the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her work translating Jenny Erpenbeck’s German-language The End of Days (check out Asymptote’s review here). And British poet and writer James Fenton has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, while PEN Translates means more ca$h for independent publishers angling towards translation (yay). Congrats!
Remember how we reported on Irish author James Joyce’s surprising popularity in China? At the London Review of Books, here’s an excellent profile of Dai Congrong, the Mandarin translator of Joyce’s super-maddening Finnegans Wake. If you’ve been following the Waywords and Meansigns project, this should come as no surprise, but China’s also experiencing a “golden age” in Internet literature, as well. If you just can’t get enough Joyce, here’s a listicle with ten more suggestions—though really, isn’t “enough Joyce” always enough? Meanwhile, in Iran, the necessity of translation to achieve a global readership—and prestige—is becoming all the more clear.