This week, our editors are bringing you news from Morocco, Sweden, Vietnam, and France In Morocco, changes to the ministry of communication are affecting book imports. In Sweden, the announcement of the August Prize has brought excitement, whilst the awarding of the Tucholsky Prize to Swedish-Chinese writer Gui Minhai has been met with indignation in China. In Vietnam, the sales of a much-anticipated translation of bestseller South Korean writer Cho Nam-joo have not been as expected. In France, the centennial of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop was celebrated. Read on to find out more!
Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco
Last month, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI ordered major bureaucratic reform, slashing the government’s thirty-nine member cabinet to just twenty-four—the smallest ever—and doing away with the ministry of communication. While the official line was that the ministry was no longer necessary to regulate the kingdom’s newspapers (a convincing argument, given the state of Morocco’s oppositional press), the abolition of the ministry has had a perhaps unintended side effect: all book imports have been blocked in customs since early October.
The first article of Morocco’s 2003 Press Code guaranteed the freedom of domestic publications. Foreign books, on the other hand, were subject to the ministry of communication’s control. Prior to the October reform, this control was carried out by the foreign publications bureau of the ministry’s public relations division. As such, the bureau was responsible for “analyzing the content of foreign publications” and delivering (or not) the visas necessary for importation. Although Morocco does not officially practice state censorship, this process allowed the king to uphold his three red lines (the monarchy, the kingdom’s “territorial integrity,” and Islam), which were enshrined in article 29 of the Press Code.
However, the hasty suppression of the ministry of communication has meant that no foreign books have (officially) entered the territory for five weeks and counting. Morocco’s booksellers are waiting with bated breath for a government circular to clarify whether the foreign publications bureau will be resurrected under the auspices of the ministry of the interior, the ministry of culture, or another governmental body. Meanwhile, the blockade has been a boon to Amazon: no importation visa is required to ship the company’s goods from its French warehouses directly to Moroccan consumers.
While his government sorts out the great reshuffling of the ministries, King Mohammed VI has sanctimoniously pardoned jailed journalist Hajar Raissouni. The pardon comes after much public outcry and international attention, including the Call of 429, a viral sensation that united ten thousand self-proclaimed “sexual outlaws,” among which the Prix Goncourt-winning Franco-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani. The call was modelled after France’s famous Manifesto of the 343 (a pro-choice petition published in 1971) and sought to overturn article 429 of the Moroccan penal code, which criminalizes sexual relations outside of wedlock. The law remains in vigor, although Raissouni is free at last.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
Fall is literary award season in Sweden! After the announcement of the Nobel Prize in early October comes the announcement of the August Prize nominees. Named after writer, painter, and early Modernist August Strindberg (Miss Julie, The Red Room), the prize is the most prestigious award in Swedish literature and includes the three categories: fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature. Out of the eighteen nominees, one winner is awarded in each category at the August Gala on November 25.
This year’s nominees in the fiction category include writer, translator, and critic Steve Sem-Sandberg for the novel W, most recently known to readers in English for the novels The Chosen Ones (2016) and The Emperor of Lies (2011).
In the non-fiction category, writer, journalist, and publishing editor Anna-Karin Palm is nominated for her biography about Selma Lagerlöf. Lagerlöf, an icon in Swedish literary history, is the author of The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson and The Saga of Gösta Berling, the first female Literary Nobel Prize Laureate in 1909, and five years later the first woman to become a member of the Swedish Academy.
Another of the non-fiction nominees is Patrik Svensson, a journalist who with this his first book has already received incredible attention. The book, which is investigating the mysterious life of the eel, was already sold to over 30 countries at the time of its Swedish launch earlier this year.
In the children’s book category, novelist and dramatist as well as previous Swedish Academy member Sara Stridsberg is nominated for her children’s book with illustrations by Sara Lundberg. The book is a children’s version of her acclaimed novel The Gravity of Love, which also has a stage-play adaptation. Earlier this year, Stridsberg was the first Swedish writer to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize for Valerie: or, The Faculty of Dreams (2019) which is a poetic narrative about the life of Valerie Solanas, translated to the English by Deborah Bragan-Turner.
Another literary prize that has received more attention than usual this year is the Tucholsky Prize, awarded by the Swedish PEN organization each year to a writer or publicist who is persecuted, threatened, or exiled. On Friday November 15, the Swedish-Chinese writer and publisher Gui Minhai was awarded the prize in Stockholm in his absence. Gui has been held by Chinese authorities since 2015, and the Chinese embassy to Sweden has reacted strongly to the fact that Swedish PEN refused China’s request to withdraw the prize to Gui Minhai.
Quyen Nguyen, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Vietnam
Whilst in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and various countries, Cho Nam-joo’s celebrated novel Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 has sold a million copies since 2016, in Vietnam the reception of the Vietnamese translation (published by the Vietnam Women’s Publishing House) has not been as good as expected. Describing the hardships and injustices that Korean women have to go through in their daily lives, the novel is a literary phenomenon attracting huge attention, especially in patriarchal societies. After securing the right to translate the novel into Vietnamese in a competitive bidding against other leading Vietnamese publishers, the publisher was stunned by the book’s bad sales performance: despite the novel’s international success and fame, its first fifteen hundred copies have not yet sold out after the first three months since its publication in August 2019. Not only was the translation received with indifference on social media and in traditional newspapers (with only one book review on Elle Vietnam) it was also brushed off as an insignificant work by an unknown writer from the readers as well.
The unfortunate situation has been slightly improved thanks to the premiere of the movie adapted from the novel, which stars renowned actors Gong Yoo and Jung Yu-mi as the leads, on the first day of November. Seizing the golden opportunity to promote the book, the publisher ran a PR campaign in which the moviegoers could buy the book for 40% off its original price if they could present a ticket stub. Thanks to the coverage from numerous reporters on the movie on the major media outlets, the second printing of one thousand copies began right after. However, the general reception has not been hugely optimistic. Apart from several positive comments about discriminations and sexisms that women have to endure and thus praising the novel for the accurate representation of reality, most of the readers criticize the book for the lack of literary merits.
Even though Korean literature has been translated a great deal into Vietnamese in the past ten years and many household names have appeared on the bookshelves around the country—such as Han Kang, Kim Yong Ha, and Gong Ji Young—most Korean literature are still struggling to find their readers. The Vegetarian by Han Kang, for example, is virtually unknown even though the Vietnamese translation was published in 2011. Only when the book was awarded the Booker International Prize in 2016 did people begin to to read it. It is also worth mentioning that 2019 witnessed one of the slowest years in the publishing market and this might be one of the reasons why the wave of this feminist Korean novel has not managed to make any big impressions in Vietnam.
Sarah Moore, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from France
This week marked the centennial of Sylvia Beach’s legendary Parisian bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. On November 19, 1919 the bookshop opened its doors at 8 rue Dupuytren. In 1921 it moved to 12 rue de l’Odéon where, for the next two decades, it would become a literary heart of the Latin Quarter, gathering and welcoming writers from around the world including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Paul Valéry, and André Gide. Shakespeare and Company was both a bookshop and a lending library, allowing readers to borrow books with a library card.
In 1922 Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses. She collected the first two copies directly from the Dijon-Paris express train on the day of Joyce’s fortieth birthday—February 2, 1922. By the end of 1922 Joyce had become the bestseller at Shakespeare and Company and Beach continued to champion modern literature, including T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robert McAlmon.
Whilst Shakespeare and Company struggled financially during the Great Depression, its committed writers rallied for funds and it stayed open until the German occupation. In 1941 Beach refused to sell a Nazi officer her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Whilst she was able to hide all the books and items from her shop in an upstairs apartment, she was later arrested and detained for six months at a women’s internment camp at Vittel. Beach remained in Paris until her death in 1962 but her bookshop never reopened.
In 1951 American George Whitman opened his own bookshop in the Latin Quarter, Le Mistral. Later, the name “Shakespeare and Company” was offered to him by Sylvia Beach herself. The new Shakespeare and Company is still open today and continues to welcome writers from around the world. Sylvia Beach’s name lives on there in The Sylvia Beach Memorial Library, found upstairs. The centennial was celebrated at the new Shakespeare and Company with the opening of a small exhibition in this library.
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