This week, our editors are bringing news of book launches, emerging talents, one of the biggest literary awards in the world. Read on to find out more!
Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Guatemala
Last December, Argentinian author Dolores Reyes visited Guatemala to discuss her latest novel Miseria (Misery) and the process of creating it. It was the author’s second time in the country, her first visit being the occasion of the literature festival Centroamérica Cuenta (Central America Narrates) in 2021.
I arrived early at Catafixia, an independent bookstore in Guatemala City downtown—the only one with its own editorial house. There was a small group, perhaps thirty enthusiastic people, waiting for the author to arrive. Carmen Lucía Alvarado and Luis Mendez Salinas—Catafixia’s founders, editors, and trusted libreros (booksellers)—arranged golden plastic chairs for the public and created a welcoming stage for Dolores.
When Dolores arrived, the audience was enraptured, viewing the beautifully hand-curated collection of books. People were quick to find their seats; some had to stand in the back because space was limited.
Dolores and Carmen then discussed how her novels Eartheater and Miseria portray the flagellum of missing persons in Argentina—in particular of abducted women. This issue is something that is terribly close to home in Guatemala, since during the process of state terrorism in the second half of the 20th century, more than 45,000 people were disappeared by State operators. Most of their families are still looking for them. Cometierra (the titular Eartheater), her main character, is a teenager with an ability to eat earth, in order to talk to the dead and find missing people.
In one of the most touching moments of the conversation, Dolores shared that once a woman came to ask her if she had the “gift”—the ability to find people, just like Cometierra. The woman showed Dolores a picture of her daughter who had been missing for a couple of years. The author, her voice breaking, said she still didn’t know what to make of it. She knows how to tell stories and seeks to represent them with great conviction, but that was beyond her.
I couldn’t hold back the tears as I listened, and thought that the most brutal reality sneaks into fiction’s interstices. The evening closed with some beautiful words from Dolores talking about the possibility of imagining a better future in literature.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Ireland
There was much excitement last week in Dublin and throughout Ireland surrounding the announcement of The Dublin Literary Award, which has released its longlist of seventy books for the €100,000 award. It is not only this significant amount of money that makes the award so special and widely covered, but also its unusual pool of nominators—libraries around the world (eighty libraries from thirty-five countries in this edition)—and, consequently, the remarkable international scope and relevance. It also has a significant official and intellectual bearing, as it is presided by the Lord Mayor of Dublin and chaired by Chris Morash, the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin.
Literary translation is well represented, as no less then thirty-one of the seventy titles were originally published in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Among them appears the novel Solenoid by Asymptote contributor Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by another contributor to our journal, Sean Cotter. The Irish literati and literature lovers also have cause to celebrate, as four of the titles have Irish authors and, what is more, two of them have been nominated by non-Irish libraries: Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry was nominated by Stadtbücherei Frankfurt am Main; My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor by Cork City Libraries; Soldier, Sailor by Claire Kilroy by Dublin City Libraries; and Haven by Emma Donoghue by Toronto Public Library.
These titles are living proof of how literature—and particularly fiction—thrives in Ireland. And as has been the case throughout its modernity, there is a consistent dialog ranging from consistency with, to utter breakaway from, literary tradition—and that takes, just as in the above-mentioned prize, to both official and literary discourses. On January 13, President Michael D. Higgins unveiled a plaque in Rahoon Cemetery, Galway, to mark the connection of the grave of Michael ‘Sonny’ Bodkin with James Joyce, Nora Barnacle, and the “The Dead,” which the President assessed on the occasion as one of the greatest short stories of all time.
In contemporary literature, on the other hand, a recently released novella by Eoghan Smith, A Mind of Winter, whose opening page literally picks up—in landscape description—where Joyce left off in his closing paragraph of “The Dead.” And yet, while such ingenious reworking of the canonical tradition has been described as “full of admirable craftsmanship,” it is Mike McCormack’s recent dystopian novel, This Plague of Souls, which—while not reading like a dystopian novel—have led critics to embrace it as a “masterpiece.”
Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya
On November 17, 2023, the winners of the Morland African Writing Scholarships were announced. The recipients, all writers of fiction, include Rafeeat Aliyu (Nigeria), Kiprop Kimutai (Kenya), Remy Ngamije (Rwanda/Namibia), and Mubanga Kalimamukwento (Zambia). Each received a grant of £18,000 to allow them to take a year off and focus on their writing. As the only Kenyan among the winners, Kiprop Kimutai also won the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize for his manuscript The Freedom of Birds, selected by Tsitsi Dangaremba.
On January 18, Somanamibooks hosted an exclusive Kenyan book launch for Kobby Ben Ben’s No One Dies Yet, a riveting debut novel published in August last year, and also named as one of the Guardian’s best fiction of 2023. The genre-bending novel revolves around the shadow of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the post-colonial condition of modern Ghana. As to the author himself, he needs no introduction to book lovers in Kenya due to his large presence in literary media spaces, while also acting as a prominent book reviewer, running the bookish Instagram, bookworm_man, and Ghana Must Read.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: