Over the past ten years the European Literature Network—a tiny organization, run on a shoestring budget—has firmly established itself as the foremost champion of European writing in the UK. Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, caught up with the network’s founder and driving force, Rosie Goldsmith, and editor, West Camel.
Julia Sherwood (JS): Rosie, your name has become synonymous with European literature in the UK. You’ve chaired numerous European Literature Nights and, more recently, the jury of the EBRD Literature Prize. I can barely imagine the UK without your organization but some Asymptote readers, who are based elsewhere, may not be so familiar with what you do. Can you tell us what got you to start European Literature Network and what it does?
Rosie Goldsmith (RG): It all started with the European Literature Night (ELN) at the British Library in 2009, hence the rather long name, European Literature Network. I was asked to chair that and be one of the judges. We had to select from about 50-70 texts. Initially it was just me—I’d just left my job with the BBC, I had time on my hands, and when ELN was over, I felt that the momentum should be kept. After a trip to Brussels for the European Union Literature Prize with some twenty editors and publishers, I suggested that we keep this going. So many great books are being published but few people know about them, so I decided to do something I care passionately about and help everyone in the trade connect and get these books to the public. I organized the first meeting at the Goethe-Institut London and later we started meeting at Europe House, which was run by the European Commission but has sadly ceased to operate after Brexit.
The European Literature Network saw its mission as promoting international literature to a broad audience, and it still does today. Our main focus is Britain and Europe—we had to be very specific about that to get funding—but Europe in the broadest sense, not just the EU, including Russia, Turkey, and beyond. Our goal is to support others working in this area: publishers, translators, the trade, and bring them all together. We are just a small team of people, working part-time: right now it’s myself, Anna Blasiak, West Camel, and Alyson Coombes. Max Easterman runs the accounts. It’s a real shoestring operation. The main idea is to function as a network for our members. They are the ones who have to provide the input, we can’t create their events for them or raise money for them, we just provide a platform and support their events. We also organize workshops and speak on panels. We get more attention now because of Brexit. I’m now asked to talk about European culture a lot.
JS: Would you say that these efforts will be even more important in the post-Brexit era and if so, why?
RG: Yes, definitely, for me as a Remainer this is an absolute no-brainer. This is I what I care about and what we’ve wanted to support all our lives. We are even more necessary now. In my Brexit newsletter in January 2020 I wrote: “Anger, disbelief and frustration following the 2016 referendum result have however sharpened our minds, pens, creativity, and campaigning zeal. We are defiant in the face of adversity. Our partners and successes are impressive; we print magazines and publish regular reviews; we are quoted.” It’s important for us to keep up these activities, even more so since the coronavirus hit us. We’ve all lost so much, our lives and work have been turned upside down, but books, reading, and communicating are even more essential. We have migrated our work online. We communicate via videolink and remote-working. The old skills as a BBC broadcaster have kicked in!
JS: For a few years now, you have been publishing Riveting Reviews. How did that come about?
RG: 2015 was an incredible time for popular translated fiction: Elena Ferrante, Klaus Ove Knausgård, Stieg Larsson, all the Nordic Noir . . . And there just wasn’t enough space in the traditional media to review everything. I had just read all of Elena Ferrante and although I’m a professional reviewer, no one commissioned me to do a review. So I thought: OK, I’ve got something to say so why don’t I start online reviews? By then Anna Blasiak and I had been running our website for a couple of years, with blogs and other content, and I decided to create some regular reviews. We started to do it monthly, so that people could make a date with the website and with the European Literature Network. Then, in 2017, West Camel came on board—he’s the most amazing editor. Since then, we’ve kept up a monthly rhythm. We also want to do something to promote literature that hasn’t yet been translated and earlier this year we began The Italianist, a regular Italian book post created by the translator Katherine Gregor.
JS: Who are your reviewers and how do you choose the books to be reviewed? Is there a thematic or geographic focus?
West Camel (WC): Most of our reviewers come from the network. We have regulars who know the kind of length and always deliver on time, but we’re always looking for new reviewers: we advertise on the website, in the newsletter, and at our meetings too. We’d like to commission more reviews and pay for them, but unfortunately our funding is so minimal, we can’t afford to operate like that. So we take the attitude that if somebody offers a review to us, we are happy to publish it, provided it’s of decent quality. Some people come to us because they’ve read something, others approach us asking if we have something for them to review, and I often have publishers’ copies that I can suggest. Mostly it’s books that have recently appeared in English translation, but occasionally we break that rule and review something that’s not yet been translated or was written in English, such as the latest Aleksandar Hemon. In any case, it has to be a European writer and a European topic. The reviews are not country-specific but once or twice a year we have a country focus. And of course we include reviews in our magazine, The Riveter.
RG: We encourage everyone who feels that they have read a book, loved it, and would love to write about it, to contribute a review. And at the other end of the scale, we have professional reviewers or journalists writing for us, like Barry Forshaw, Max Easterman, Lucy Popescu, John Munch and Caroline Wyatt, and West and me, when we can. They guarantee our professionalism and they enjoy doing it.
WC: Many of our reviewers are also translators or writers themselves. For example, the Estonian author Rein Raud often writes for us. I think he does this because he understands that, however well-known he is in Estonia, it is difficult to get his books reviewed in the UK, so he’s willing to help other authors out. Hopefully someone else might do the same for him. Similarly, many translators are willing to review other translators’ work because they understand how difficult it is to be noticed.
JS: When did you start publishing the magazine and how is it different from the regular reviews in scope or ambition?
RG: The Riveter is about making things happen, and Rosie The Riveter is also my nickname. It started in 2017, when Polish literature was the focus at London Book Fair. It generated quite a few reviews but there wasn’t anywhere to publish them, so I thought: why not create a magazine?
WC: Our usual monthly reviews feature ten or eleven books, while The Riveter will have at least twenty; the most recent one, The German Riveter, had over thirty. The magazine may also include reviews published earlier on the website, and it also features extracts, essays, commentary, poetry, all sorts of things. The reviews cover almost everything from poetry, children’s books to fiction and non-fiction, graphic novels—basically any writing from Europe published in recent years, preferably in English translation.
JS: West, in your afterword to The German Riveter you mention that everyone expects German authors to write about recent history, creating a kind of closed loop. Can you elaborate on that?
WC: Much of German literature has been concerned with twentieth-century history, and a major theme has been coming to terms with the country’s past. So readers have come to expect books that deal with these events, and want to read them because it is within living memory and still has a huge impact on their lives. Publishers love those kinds of books because they sell: essentially, people keep buying books about the Nazis. But editing the magazine, I got the sense that some writers want to break the mould and show that German literature isn’t just about the War and the twentieth century, during which this enormous rupture occurred for the country. When we launched The German Riveter at the British Library, we had three German writers who said that some key books about eighteenth and nineteenth-century history seem to be doing really well in Germany. These are the green shoots of a literature that isn’t about twentieth-century wars.
JS: Rosie, in your editorial for The German Riveter you talk of the great diversity of German literature, the various ethnic backgrounds and lots of interesting women authors writing today.
RG: We brought out The German Riveter on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the revolutions in Eastern Europe. So the main focus was contemporary literature, but we did reach further back in time—to provide some context we also included excerpts from books written about the Berlin Wall ten, twenty, thirty years ago, as well as older stories. People still think of German literature as being heavy: classics such as Goethe, Schiller, Brecht, Günter Grass, Christa Wolff come to mind. But there is an awful lot else that people are reading and writing as well. I think we’ve produced something new and very different by including an incredible number of women—from well-known writers such as Jenny Erpenbeck and Julia Franck, to the poet Ulrike Almut Sandig and poetry of the Holocaust—that people just don’t know about. We have also featured authors writing in German with different backgrounds, such as the Georgian-born Nino Haratischwili, who presented the English translation (by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin) of her monumental novel The Eighth Life.
The majority of translators in the magazine are women. In fact, diversity is something that has always been part of what we do, we’ve always ticked all those boxes that people are constantly going on about now. We’ve always wanted international literature to be popular and interesting. We’ve wanted to involve more women, but also BAME writers and authors with an immigrant background. We have always been inclusive because of the background of those in our team, which is very diverse.
JS: That brings me to The Queer Riveter—what were the specific challenges you faced in putting this issue together?
WC: The main challenge was to find queer writing from Europe that has been translated into English. As I’ve said earlier, we aim to be quite current in terms of the books we cover, but for this we had to break our own rules and go further back, because ‘queer European writing in English translation’ is a niche within a niche within a niche. So it was really useful to find someone like Lawrence Schimel, who was the poetry editor for this issue. He has translated and brought to our attention authors who haven’t appeared in English before. Finding reviewers was also quite tricky as some people felt they were not qualified as they weren’t gay themselves, although, of course, that wasn’t a condition at all.
RG: Exactly, I’m not gay either but that’s not the point. The point is not whether we are gay or not. We have to be open, curious and ready to learn—not necessarily experts. This goes back to the very ethos of Riveting Reviews: it’s about making the books popular and accessible, so that our mums will read it and understand it. Or so that people in a little bookshop in Truro can find it. It’s about moving beyond the niche, whatever niche it is—translated or queer literature—and making everybody see that it’s just good writing.
JS: If someone would like to write a review for you, what should they do?
WC: They will find a set of rules on our website outlining what kind of reviews we’re looking for. We are quite flexible about our formal requirements: if somebody wants to write 500 words—which is more than they’d write if they were commissioned by other journals—that’s fine. But we’re equally happy to publish something shorter: for example, Barry Forshaw seldom writes more than 250 words, because that’s the format he’s used to.
JS: What are you planning for the next Riveter, or the next few?
WC: The next one in 2020 will be Romanian. It will be a celebration of the Timișoara Poetry Festival but will not focus exclusively on poetry. Next up is The Dutch Riveter, in partnership with the Dutch literature foundation, Letterenfonds, which is running a big, twenty-month-long programme, New Dutch Literature, to promote new books from the Netherlands in English translation. We’ll include some Flemish writers too, writing in Dutch.
For 2021 we’re planning an Iberian Riveter. It may be just Spanish, or Spanish and Portuguese: we’re trying to decide at the moment. It’s a political and a financial decision because to publish the Riveter magazine we need funding, and that usually comes from the cultural organization in the country the issue is based around. So, for The Swiss Riveter, we had funding from Pro Helvetia, for The German Riveter from the Goethe Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and the German Embassy. In 2021 Spain will be the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, so they want to fund a lot of Spanish activities. After that we’ll be publishing a Balkans Riveter—here, too, we’ll have to negotiate the politics, deciding which Balkans countries and languages to include.
JS: West, you are an author in your own right. Has editing the Riveting Reviews had an impact on your own writing or provided you with inspiration?
WC: It has, definitely. When commissioning work for the magazines, I see many books that I’m interested in. I can’t read them all, but I do see the reviews. A review can encapsulate something written in a style I wouldn’t write in, or experiments I might never have thought of. I also discover books that may echo some of my own work. I’m just writing my second novel and am doing something with the point of view, and the idea of what’s close and what’s distant in terms of the reader’s perspective on a character—what do you allow the reader to see? I’m pretty sure those ideas come from my reading—you find a lot more of these kind of ideas in, say, French literature, although I can’t pinpoint a particular book or writer! I certainly think that being exposed to that much experimentation affects my own writing.
Rosie Goldsmith is an award-winning journalist specializing in arts and foreign affairs. For twenty years at the BBC, she travelled the world and presented several flagship programmes. She has lived in Europe, Africa, and the USA and today she combines journalism with chairing and curating literary events and festivals for leading cultural organizations. Known as a champion of international literature, translation, and language learning, she promotes them whenever she can. She is Founder and Director of the European Literature Network www.eurolitnetwork.com and Chair of the Judges of the EBRD Literature Prize, a major new prize honouring both author and translator of international literary works in English translation.
Born and bred in south London, West Camel has worked as a book and arts journalist, and was editor at Dalkey Archive Press, where he edited the Best European Fiction 2015 anthology. He currently combines his work as an editor at Orenda Books with writing and editing for arts organizations, including editing The Riveter magazine for the European Literature Network. He has written several short scripts and was longlisted for the Old Vic’s 12 playwrights project. Attend is his first novel and was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize.
Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Since 2008 she has been working as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction from Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, and Russian. She is based in London and is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia.
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