In this week of updates from around the world, our Editors-at-Large in Bulgaria, Ireland, and India cover events and awards around key figures in their countries’ respective literary traditions, from the legacies of monumental writers to the emergence of new and impassioned voices.
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria
I discovered Viktor Paskov, a Bulgarian writer and musician, in my early twenties. His books, which without fail reminded me of harmonically complex jazz compositions, left me enthralled and, unsurprisingly, with a wonderful melody stuck inside my head. Despite Paskov’s untimely passing at the age of 59 in 2009, his legacy is very much alive, and his work continues to inspire and stimulate the minds of his readers.
A recent example of his lingering influence is The Literature and Translation House’s announcement of the official launch of a new translation award under his name. The initiative has been made possible through a collaboration with Sofia University and, specifically, its Master’s degree program in translation and editing. According to the organizers, among them Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, a French translator specialized in the Bulgarian language, “the award’s goal is to honor texts that demonstrate an excellent command of the Bulgarian language in all of its expressive possibilities, coherence, and an ethical approach to the original text—to its rhythm, language(s), registers, historicity, images, and worlds.”
The evaluation of the candidates is split into two phases. First, students from the above-mentioned Master’s program, academic staff, and other respected professionals in the field of literature will review the nominated works. The five short-listed translations, then, will be assessed by a specially formed jury with at least one of its members fluent in the original language of at least one of the books.
Last but not least, Paskov has been commemorated even further, with the date on which the winner is expected to be revealed coinciding with his own birth date, September 10. What a great way to be remembered!
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland and Spain
After interviewing poet Lorna Shaughnessy for our winter issue, I was thrilled to attend the first outing in Galway of Macha Press, where Lorna is a co-founding editor. The all-island press, founded in 2024 and managed by seven women poets from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, has an ambitious program to publish two collections every year, one by an established poet and one by a rising star. Two days ago, on April 9, Macha Press launched their first two poetry collections—one by Eilish Martin and the other by Sam Furlong—at Charlie Byrne’s bookshop as part of Cúirt International Literary Festival 2025.
People literally crowded in on Wednesday night to see and listen to Eilish Martin and Sam Furlong read from their new books at this legendary venue, right off of the both bustling and quaint Shop Street in the Latin Quarter. There was both solemnity and a celebratory mood in the all-age audience that flooded the bookstore, and that suited the releases: Martin’s ! All’arme / ? And what… if not and Furlong’s Crowd Work, two black-and-white one-of-a-kind exhibit objects blending well-tempered experimental formatting, classy typefacing, and eye-catching artistic design. The latter played specifically off of Martin’s widely praised cross-artform and multimedia poetic experimentalism, which was intriguingly balanced in her reading by a mesmerizing mix of candid confessionalism, intertextual dialogue (call-and-response poetics, found and erasure poetry engaging Szymborska’s oeuvre), and indelibly well-crafted verse. In much enjoyed contrast, Furlong jazzed up the atmosphere with a spirited, humorous, and politically charged approach that framed their poems with alternately vivid and jaded non-binary corporeal sociality and eroticism, ironical (mis)translations of popular culture, and anti-complacent crisis awareness.
Lorna is involved today in another Cúirt event interviewing Astrid Huisman, the literary translator-in-residence at University of Galway’s Emily Anderson Centre, an initiative led by Professor Anne O’Connor. O’Connor will also be chairing a round-table conversation with Asymptote long-standing contributor Daniel Hahn later this month at the same centre.
In the other literature that I follow closely, academic rockstar Diana Roig-Sanz at Universitat Oberta de Catalonia drew my attention to the series of events Asymptote past contributor Felix Nicolau has been organizing recently in Spain. After transitioning from Complutense University of Madrid to University of Granada last fall, Nicolau started a literary reading series at his new school’s Romanian Language and Literature Department. The ongoing Ziua Culturii Române / Dia de la Cultura Rumana (Day of Romanian Culture) involves Romanian and Spanish writers, translators, and book or journal issue launches in a prodigious sequence of already dozens of events Nicolau has been curating over the few months since his appointment.
Zohra Salih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
He says he never expected it, but for most Indians it would have hardly been a surprise, rather, an inevitability—Vinod Kumar Shukla was recently conferred the 59th Jnanpith Award, India’s oldest and highest literary honor. It includes a cash prize of eleven lakh rupees, as well as a bronze Saraswati statue, and it is only awarded to Indian writers writing in one of the twenty-two constitutionally recognised Indian languages. Shukla has been awarded the prize for the year 2024.
The 88-year-old litterateur’s reaction to the news is most telling of the kind of writer—and person—he is. To quote him: “Maine dekha bahut, suna bhi maine bahut, mehsoos bhi kiya bahut, lekin likhne mei thoda hi likha” (I saw a lot, I also heard a lot, and I felt immensely, but I wrote very little). This kind of deeply felt, disarming simplicity is his trademark, and to read him is to be keenly aware that one is in the presence of a profound observer. Over an illustrated career spanning more than fifty years, Vinod Kumar Shukla has come to be known for his extraordinary sensitivity to the strangeness of ordinary life, in particular for how his stories, written in a poetic register, are able to juggle imagination and reality.
He previously won the Sahitya Akademi Award for both Naukar Ki Kameez (1979) and Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi (1999). Naukar Ki Kameez was adapted by eminent film auteur Mani Kaul. Other accolades include the PEN/Nabokov International Literature Award (2023), of which he happens to be the twelfth Hindi writer to win, as well as the first from Chattisgarh. Interestingly, Shukla holds a postgraduate degree in agricultural science and insists that he only became a writer because of his failing the twelfth grade—thus foregoing his destiny as an engineer to turn to the world of letters. Yet his work has always echoed a deep understanding of small-town, rural life, and up until his retirement, Shukla professionally taught the subject in parallel to his formidable writing career.
Perhaps one of the best non-literary introductions to Shukla’s world and sensibility would be to watch the lovingly rendered Achal Mishra 2024 documentary on the author’s life, Chaar Phool Hai Aur Duniya Hai, available to watch on Mubi. I end this dispatch by quoting him again:
Every person should write one book, at the very least. Because the geography of your childhood—one should keep returning to it. Because forgetting is a kind of leaving behind, and remembering is trying to bring it back.
*****
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