Dear reader,
Can we be frank with you this #GivingTuesday? We had high hopes entering this final year of one full decade in world literature, but 2020 has been terrible. Not only did a key team member contract the coronavirus with symptoms persisting till this very day, a record number of staff left because of pandemic-related reasons. Although we had long planned for another edition of our translation contest to mark our tenth anniversary, we couldn’t go through with it in the end. For a while, our future was more uncertain than it had ever been since December 2014, when I sent out a teamwide memo telling my editors not to accept any more new work.
But rally we did, adding thirty-five new team members in August. We showcased literary responses to the coronavirus outbreak at the blog and in our Summer 2020 issue. We brought you a Dutch Literature Feature guest-edited by International Booker Prize-winning Michele Hutchison. We rebooted our podcast and video trailer, launched not one but two Instagram feeds, and even conducted our first live Q&A over Zoom with the translator of our October Book Club selection. We hope to do many more.
For the most part of our ten years, we’ve been happy to stay in the background while lifting others up. But, because it’s been a challenging year and we are not lucky enough to be incorporated in the US and the UK and so didn’t receive any of the relief grants that so many like organizations got, we have to ask: Can you spare us five bucks a month?
Because that’s all it takes to sustain our journal—if enough of you stand with us. Fancy being a patron or even a masthead member? We’d be so thrilled and shower you with perks—including newly unveiled ones like literary care packages I’ll personally assemble. We just want to make sure that those of you who value our work have the chance to support it before it’s too late. So, if you can afford it, please take a few minutes to sign up via the link below.
