This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Poland, Sweden, and China. In Poland, Anna Zaranko’s translation of Kornel Filipowicz was awarded the 2020 Found in Translation Award; in Sweden, an anthology will soon be released of writings on coronavirus, featuring many international writers including Olga Tokarczuk; and in China, bookshops are responding to challenging times by moving to online engagement with their reading community. Read on to find out more!
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland
Since she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, Wisława Szymborska’s poetry has been appreciated around the world, while the work of her partner of twenty-three years, the master story teller Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990) remained largely unknown outside Poland. Fortunately, this has changed with The Memoir of an Anti-hero by Kornel Filipowicz, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2019 in a translation by Anna Zaranko. On March 31, Zaranko received the 2020 Found in Translation Award in recognition of her “quietly understated yet immensely evocative rendering of Filipowicz’s prose, which The Sunday Times’s David Mills described as ‘provocative, troubling, awkward, a proper classic.’”
On May 27, the winner of the eleventh Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage, awarded by the City of Warsaw, was announced online (the fourteen-minute video of the ceremony has English subtitles). The prize went to Katarzyna Kobylarczyk for Strup. Hiszpania rozdrapuje rany (The Scab. Spain Scratches its Wounds, 2019 Wydawnictwo Czarne), a book about grappling with historical memory. The jury praised it as “a fascinating story that blends the nightmarish and the grotesque, in which reality reveals its metaphorical dimension. It is proof that one can create real literature relying solely on facts.”
Among the less well-known chapters in the history of World War II is a massacre in Eastern Poland in 1943, when the village of Sochy was burned down and its Polish inhabitants murdered. Poet Anna Janko, whose mother survived the atrocities as a nine-year-old, has written a harrowing account of the devastating impact these horrors have had both on her mother and on herself. A Little Annihilation (Mała zagłada), “a beautifully scripted and deeply personal mother-daughter dialogue,” will be published by World Editions later this year in a translation by Philip Boehm, who introduces the book in this brief video.
Much of the work by the psychologist, photographer, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg relates to the trauma of the Holocaust. In 2017 he made his first foray into fiction with Rejwach, a collection of short stories based on survivor accounts he had been collecting for many years. An excerpt, translated by Asymptote’s Close Approximations translation contest winner Sean Gasper Bye, can be read in Jewish Currents, which has also published a conversation between Bye and Grynberg.
And finally, some sad news: Jerzy Pilch, one of Poland’s most important and funniest contemporary writers and journalists, passed away on May 29, aged sixty-seven. In addition to his long-running satirical feuilletons, Pilch published several novels and was nominated for Poland’s prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times, winning it in 2001 for The Mighty Angel (2009, trans. Bill Johnston). Also available in English is A Thousand Peaceful Cities (2010), which made it into the Kirkus Review of Books’ Top Books of 2010, and My First Suicide (2012), both translated by David Frick.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
In June, an anthology titled Corona. 19 författare om krisen (Corona. 19 Writers on the Crisis) will be published by Polaris Publishing in collaboration with numerous other Swedish publishing companies. The writers include Polish Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk (featured in Asymptote in 2016), Indian human rights and environmental activist as well as Man Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, Norwegian journalist and writer Åsne Seierstad, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, Italian poet and novelist Silvia Avallone, French-Moroccan film director and writer Abdellah Taïa (previously interviewed by Asymptote’s Jason Napoli Brooks), Antiguan-American writer and professor of African and African American Studies Jamaica Kincaid and British writers Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan as well as Swedish novelist Mats Strandberg. All texts have been previously published during the spring of 2020 in Swedish morning paper Dagens Nyheter. This non-profit project was initiated by one of the paper’s editors, Björn Wiman, and all proceeds will go to the Red Cross. According to Wiman and Dagens Nyheter, the book is a manifestation of the central role of literature at a time of crisis.
While the pandemic influences what writers write about and what publishers publish, literary event hosts are doing their best to substitute planned activities with online alternatives. Even though Sweden’s largest book event of the year, the Göteborg Book Fair, does not take place until September, it was recently announced that there will be no in-person activities and instead the Fair will be a digital event this year. The Book Fair usually attracts around 80,000 visitors over four days and usually has a new country each year as its Guest of Honour, with special attention given to its literature. This year’s Guest of Honour was South Africa, but due to the new circumstances, South Africa will be the Guest of Honour next year instead. However, South Africa will participate in this year’s digital format. Another participant this year will be Spotify, which is developing its audiobook services. The theme for this year’s Fair, fittingly, is digitization.
Jiaoyang Li, Chinese Social Media Manger, reporting from China
With the economic recession following the pandemic, physical bookshops are facing unprecedented challenges. Some of them have had to close, whilst others have already taken steps to transition.
Eslite Bookstore Chain closed its first bookstore, and the only twenty-four-hour shop, on May 31 in Dunan, Taiwan. The store opened in 1999. Despite heavy rain, more than 50,000 readers gathered at the store the night before its closure to show their love, respect, and to say a final farewell.
One-Way-Street Bookstore in Beijing started its new live program OWSPACE on Taobao, the largest online shopping site in China, providing columns including “New Book Showroom” “Bookshop KTV,” “Stories from the Editorial Office,” and others. Founder Xu Zhiyuan, Editor-in-Chief Wu Qi, and other team members host online events to engage their reader-based community and promote book sales.
In Shanghai, Duoyun Bookshop, named as the most beautiful “above the clouds” bookshop, has started live streaming shows, collaborating with influencers on Red Pocket Book. Sinan Poetry Bookstore, Wenjing Publishing house, Houlang Publishing house, and many others also hosted several online readings through their WeChat group community. TikTok, Kwai, Bilibili have become the most widely used social engagement and marketing platforms by bookshops and publishing houses across China.
While bookshops and publishing houses are actively embracing the convenience of the new technologies, writer Liang Wendao has made a bitter comment on his TikTok account. In his TikTok video, he stands in front of the camera sliding cardboard posters on which he has written, “I was forced to stand here.”
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