Women in Translation

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A Roundup of Book Award Winners 2025

It’s nearing the end of the year and some of the book awards I have been following have made their announcements, while others like the Dublin Literary Award 2026 are sharing their nominations for next year.

Booker Prize Winner 2025

From the Booker shortlist of six novels, the prize went to Flesh by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay, a novel that follows a man from adolescence to old age as he is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. It asks profound questions about what drives a life, what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

The judges chose it for its singularity and said:

‘At the end of the novel, we don’t know what the protagonist, István, looks like but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he’s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he’s balding because he envies another man’s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all.    

‘I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading – experiencing – this extraordinary, singular novel.’ 

And this from Keiran Goddard at the Guardian:

‘There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language.’

I haven’t read ‘Flesh‘ and I’m on the fence about it based on reviews I’ve read, the lack of interiority, the focus on toxic masculinity and comments on the base dialogue. I still remember the first time I heard about it on the Irish Women’s Summer Reading podcast live at Kildare Village, but I am yet to be convinced I would enjoy it and I am not curious enough to consider it for its “singularity“.

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Winner 2025

From their shortlist of six novels by women in translation that included works from French, Hungarian, Korean, Romanian and Swedish, the Warwick Prize this year went to :

And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström & Sigrid Rausing,

translated from Swedish by Sigrid Rausing

published by Granta.

This book is a memoir created from 13 handwritten notebooks that Johanna Ekström (1970-2022) asked her friend Sigrid Rausing to finish.

First published in Swedish in 2023, it has been described as a literary experiment, a continuation of 30 years of friendship, and a deep meditation on grief.

“Just as the end of life will take us into unknown territory, so this extraordinary book pioneers new ways of thinking, feeling and writing about losses of many kinds.

Sigrid Rausing’s completion of, and commentary on, her friend Johanna Ekström’s final notebooks is not just a poignant and powerful double memoir: it is a record of a distinguished writer’s last years and the friendship she inspired.

Its language, beautifully chosen and artfully translated, helps us confront and understand grief and absence. But it also permits us to celebrate a unique inner life of dreams and visions that now survives in memories, and words.”

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Highly Commended

The judges also highly commended:

Too Great A Sky, by Liliana Corobca,

translated from Romanian by Monica Cure

published by Seven Stories Press UK:

“This prose epic not only tells an astonishing, but largely forgotten, story of suffering and endurance amid the terrors of total war; Liliana Corobca also turns her historical research into the experience of Romanians deported by Soviet authorities from Bucovina to Kazakhstan into captivating fiction.

In Monica Cure’s immersive translation, the narrator’s voice seasons horror and upheaval with humour, resilience and folkloric charm as she recounts the ordeal of the deportees and the ways they survived it. This mighty, moving novel transforms fact into art, and brings ancient storytelling skills to bear on modern tragedies.”

Both these sound excellent and I’m definitely keen to read them, so watch this space for future reviews once I manage to get hold of copies. Ask your library to get these in, if they have a copy already, I’d love to hear what you think of them if you’re also interested to read them.

An Post Irish Book Awards 2025

I didn’t create a post this year for the Irish Book Awards but I like to read Irish literature, so I keep an eye on it, in particular fiction and memoir/biography.

Exclusively Irish, inclusive in every other sense, the An Post Irish Book Awards brings together the entire literary community – readers, authors, booksellers, publishers and librarians to celebrate Irish writing.

A reminder of the shortlist for fiction, from which I have reviewed two. You can read the shortlists of the other prizes here.

Eason Novel of the Year shortlist 2025

  • Conversation with the Sea by Hugo Hamilton (Hachette Books Ireland)
  • Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins)
  • Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney (Harvill, Penguin)
  • Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell (Scribner Bools from Simon & Schuster)
  • The Benefactors by Wendy Erksine (Sceptre)
  • The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr (Picador, Pan MacMillan)
  • The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor (Harvill, Penguin)
  • Venetian Vespers by John Banville (Faber)

Eason Novel of the Year Winner 2025

Nesting by Rosisin O'Donnell longlisted for Womens Prize fiction 2025 Reading Ireland Month

The winner of the novel of the year went to:

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell

a story of one woman’s escape from a coercive relationship and the challenges faced to stay away, while trying against the odds to build a new life.

Two of the shortlisted authors also won elsewhere.

Joseph O’Connor’s The Ghosts of Rome won the people’s choice, The Last Word Listener’s Choice Award and Elaine Feeney took home The Library Association of Ireland Author of the Year Award.

The popular fiction award went to Celia Ahearn’s Paper Heart, and The Book Centre Crime Fiction award went to It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara.

Non-Fiction Awards

The Dubray Biography of the Year went to A Time for Truth: My Father Jason and My Search for Justice and Healing by Sarah Corbett Lynch and the nonfiction award went to Deadly Silence: A Sister’s Battle to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of Clodagh and Her Sons by Alan Hawe by Jacqueline Connolly & Kathryn Rogers.

Lots to consider here for next year’s Reading Irish Month in March 2026.

Have you read any of the above prize winners?

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Warwick Prize for Women in Translation shortlist 2025

Six titles have been shortlisted for the 2025 Warwick Prize, established by the University of Warwick to address the gender imbalance in translated literature.

The prize highlights outstanding writing and aims to broaden the range of international women’s voices accessible to readers in the UK and Ireland. In its ninth year, from 145 eligible entries across 34 languages, came a longlist of 14 titles and now this shortlist of six titles from five languages.

Judges Comments

The judging panel of Boyd Tonkin, Susan Bassnett and Véronique Tadjo noted that the three remarkable novels on this year’s shortlist – by Evelyne Trouillot (Haiyi), Han Kang (South Korea) and Liliana Corobca (Romania) – deal in different but equally powerful ways with the traumas of history, and their long afterlives in memory, art and narrative.

“From Haiti, South Korea and the lands of the former Soviet Union, these books make the lingering shadows of the past into fully-realised experiences that can be transformed and redeemed by their telling.

“In contrast, Maylis Besserie reinvents the genre of the “artist-novel” with wit, compassion and ingenuity. Kristina Toth’s luminous and haunting poetry tells the story of a self, in public and private. And Johanna Ekström’s and Sigrid Rausing’s commanding end-of-life memoir looks, with singular craft and courage, at how all our stories end.

The 2025 shortlist, in alphabetical order, comprises:

Image of the shortlisted books

And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing (Sweden) (biographical memoir)

translated from Swedish by Sigrid Rausing (Granta)

And the Walls Became the World All Around Johanna Ekstrom translated by Sigrid Rausing

– Johanna Ekstrom was a Swedish artist and writer who published over a dozen books of poetry, fiction and memoir in her lifetime. In 2022, ill with cancer, she asked her closest friend, Sigrid Rausing, to edit and finish her final book. Originally a memoir on the loss of a relationship during the pandemic, the focus shifted from the loss of love to, potentially, the loss of life.

These excerpts from Ekstrom’s notebooks interwoven with Rausing’s reflections on the text and on their friendship are a testament to a voice and a life; a book made in grief over the loss of a close friendship of over thirty years.

Désirée Congo by Evelyne Trouillot (Haiti) (Historial fiction)

translated from French by M.A. Salvodon (University of Virginia Press)

Desiree Congo by Evelyne Trouillot

– Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution. In this richly textured work, Trouillot constructs an intricate web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of upheaval.

A lyrical book whose characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon’s imperial forces; a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.

Maylis Besserie, Francis Bacon’s Nanny (France) (Historical Fiction/ 20th Century Irish Art)

translated from French by Clíona Ní Ríordáin (The Lilliput Press)

Francis Bacon's Nanny by Mayliss Besserie translated from French by Clíona Ní Ríordáin

– At the centre of the life of the great artists was an unexpected life-long influences Jessie Lightfoot shielded a young Francis Bacon from the brutish violence of his bullying father, as well as from his worst self-immolating excesses later in life. The tenderness, wit and warmth of this inimitable Nanny stands in illuminating relief to the sulphurous palette that defined Bacon’s work.

Beyond the humour and heart of an extraordinary woman confronted with the shade and guile of the art world, Maylis Besserie offers a glimpse of Ireland in the first half of the 20th Centure, a place apart from the rest of the world, whose landscapes, imagery and animals haunted the painter’s canvases.

In the final of Maylis Besserie’s trilogy, her focus on the art and lives of artists who crossed borders between France and Ireland closes as Bacon confronts boundaries between the real and the imagined.

Krisztina Tóth, My Secret Life : Selected Poems (Hungary)

translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books)

My Secret Life, Krisztina Tóth (Hungary) translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes

– Krisztina Tóth is one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, she is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English.

My Secret Life is the first book of Krisztina Tóth’s poetry in English translation. The poems were selected by her from five of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems.  This retrospective is translated by George Szirtes, winner of The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024.

‘Her work has the nervous energy of the times but is shaped by a deep and disciplined intelligence. Her subjects are invariably human. They are concerned with love, family, friendship, loss, and a kind of existential disaffection. Tragic in one sense but ever inventive, full of life’s minute yet highly resonant particulars, they seem to extend into an almost cinematic narrative about the cruelties of factory farming, murder, ageing, the treatment of women as sex toys and death itself. She is a bravura formalist when she needs to be. Her vigour and scope are enormous.’ – George Szirtes

Liliana Corobca, Too Great A Sky (Romania) (Historical fiction)

translated from Romanian by Monica Cure (Seven Stories Press UK)

The story of the deportation of Romanians from Bukovina to the steppes of Siberia in World War Two, an exercise in historical memory and a powerful story of maintaining humanity in impossible conditions.

Ana is eleven when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bukovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three-week long journey via freight train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the train wagon in the form of storytelling, riddles, and ritual.

Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great-granddaughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candour, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map.

Han Kang, We Do Not Part (South Korea) (Historical fiction)

translated from Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK)

We Do Not Part Han Kang shortlisted Warwick Prize for Women in Translation

– One morning in December, Kyungha is called to her friend Inseon’s hospital bedside. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation following a wood-chopping accident, Inseon is bedridden and begs Kyungha to take the first plane to her home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, who will quickly die unless it receives food.

As Kyungha arrives a snowstorm hits. Lost in a world of snow, she begins to wonder if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. She doesn’t yet suspect the darkness awaiting at her friend’s house.

There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive, documenting the terrible massacre 70 years before that saw 30,000 Jeju civilians murdered.

We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.

* * * * * *

The winner will be announced on 27 November 2025 at a ceremony in London. 

Have you read any of the six books shortlisted? Let us know in the comments below.

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Warwick Prize for Women in Translation longlist 2025

Fourteen titles have been longlisted for the 8th annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. The 2025 competition received a total of 145 eligible entries from 34 languages.

The longlist covers 10 languages, with Slovenian represented for the first time in the history of the prize. 

The £1000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. 

“For this award that considers all genres on equal terms, the judges have found longlist places not only for fiction of all sorts – from fiercely contemporary short stories to the epic debut by one of the 20th century’s greatest literary voices. We have selected searing memoir too, and (this year) an especially rich haul of poetry. The poetry books stretch from luminous snapshots of everyday experience to immersive mythic narrative in verse. Like our prose selections, they demonstrate the vision and artistry both of the original authors – and of the translators who carry this precious cargo across languages and cultures. Without them, our imaginative worlds would be so much smaller, and poorer.”

The 14 longlisted titles are:

And the Walls Became the World All Around, Johanna Ekström & Sigrid Rausing (Sweden)

translated from Swedish by Sigrid Rausing (Granta) (Biography/Memoir)

– Johanna Ekstrom was a Swedish artist and writer who published over a dozen books of poetry, fiction and memoir in her lifetime. In 2022, ill with cancer, she asked her closest friend, Sigrid Rausing, to edit and finish her final book. Originally a memoir on the loss of a relationship during the pandemic, the focus shifted from the loss of love to, potentially, the loss of life.

These excerpts from Ekstrom’s notebooks interwoven with Rausing’s reflections on the text and on their friendship are a testament to a voice and a life; a book made in grief over the loss of a close friendship of over thirty years.

Désirée Congo, Evelyne Trouillot (Haitian)

translated from French by M.A. Salvodon (University of Virginia Press)

– Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution. In this richly textured work, Trouillot constructs an intricate web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of upheaval.

A lyrical book whose characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon’s imperial forces – a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.

Djinns, Fatma Aydemir (Kurdish)

translated from German by Jon Cho-Polizzi (Peirene Press)

– For thirty years, Hüseyin has worked in Germany, taking every extra shift and carefully saving, providing for his wife and their four children. Finally, he has set aside enough to buy an apartment back in Istanbul – a new centre for the family and a place for him to retire. Just as this future is in reach, Hüseyin’s tired heart gives up. His family rush to him, travelling from Germany by plane and car, each of his children conflicted as they process their relationship with their parents, and each other.

Reminiscent of Bernardine Evaristo or Zadie Smith, Djinns portrays a family at the end of the 20th century in all its complexity: full of secrets, questions, silence and love.

The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk (Poland)

translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

– In Sept 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student suffering from TB, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money, status and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things begin to happen around the guesthouse. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach them, a sense of dread builds. Someone, or something seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realise, as he tries to unravel truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they’ve chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

Francis Bacon’s Nanny, Maylis Besserie (France)

translated from French by Clíona Ní Ríordáin (The Lilliput Press)

– At the centre of the life of the great artists was an unexpected life-long influences Jessie Lightfoot shielded a young Francis Bacon from the brutish violence of his bullying father, as well as from his worst self-immolating excesses later in life. The tenderness, wit and warmth of this inimitable Nanny stands in illuminating relief to the sulphurous palette that defined Bacon’s work.

Beyond the humour and heart of an extraordinary woman confronted with the shade and guile of the art world, Maylis Besserie offers a glimpse of Ireland in the first half of the 20th C, a place apart from the rest of the world, whose landscapes, imagery and animals haunted the painter’s canvases.

In the final of Maylis Besserie’s trilogy, her focus on the art and lives of artists who crossed borders between France and Ireland closes as Bacon confronts boundaries between the real and the imagined.

Hungry for What, María Bastarós (Spain)

translated from Spanish by Kevin Gerry Dunn (Daunt Books Publishing)

– Violence and desire shatter the surface of the everyday in an exceptional collection of short stories.

A game between a woman’s father and husband simmers and boils into scalding danger; a daughter creates an elaborate feast for her grieving mother; a solar eclipse burns the emotions and truths of a suppressed neighbourhood into the open.

Foregrounding voices and experiences of women and children, veering from claustrophobic, suffocating suburbia to untamed nature and its great vistas of desert and sky, hungry for what focuses on the terror of normality, prising back its veneer of respectability to reveal the hostility & menace that seethe beneath.

Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante (Italy) 

translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee (Penguin Press)

– For years Elisa has lived in an imaginary world of her own but when her guardian dies, young Elisa feels compelled to confront the truth of her family’s tortured and dramatic history by telling the story of her mother, Anna, and grandmother, Cesira. Elisa is a seductive, if less than reliable, spinner of stories, drawing the reader into a tale of intrigue, treachery and self-delusion, which is increasingly revealed to be an exploration of a legacy of political and social injustice.

First published in 1948, Elsa Morante’s novel won the Viareggio Prize & earned her the lasting admiration of writers such as Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg.

My Secret Life, Krisztina Tóth (Hungary)

translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books)

– My Secret Life is the first book in English translation by one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The poems in My Secret Life were selected from three of nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems. 

Phantom Pain Wings, Kim Hyesoon (South Korea)

translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi (And Other Stories)

– Winged ventriloquy – a powerful new poetry collection channelling the language of birds by one of South Korea’s innovative contemporary writers. An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an “I-do-bird-sequence,” where “Bird-human is the ‘I.’”

Too Great A Sky, Liliana Corobca (Romania)

translated from Romanian by Monica Cure (Seven Stories Press UK)

– The story of the deportation of Romanians from Bukovina, an exercise in historical memory which demonstrates how to maintain humanity in impossible conditions.

Translation of the Route, Laura Wittner (Argentina)

translated from Spanish by Juana Adcock (Bloodaxe Books & Poetry Translation Centre)

– In poems that are precise, frank & finely tuned, award-winning Argentine poet Laura Wittner explores the specificities of parental and familial love, life after marriage, and the re-ignition of the self in middle age.

Un Amor, Sara Mesa (Spain)

translated from Spanish by Katie Whittemore (Peirene Press)

– Fleeing from past mistakes, Nat leaves her life in the city for the rural village of La Escapa. She rents a small house from a negligent landlord, adopts a dog and begins to work on her first literary translation. But nothing is easy: the dog is ill tempered and skittish and misunderstandings with her neighbour’s thrum below the surface. When conflict arises over repairs to her house, Nat receives an unusual offer that tests her sense of self, challenges her prejudices, and reveals her most unexpected desires. As she tries to understand her decision, the community of La Escapa comes together in search of a scapegoat.

Vanishing Points, Lucija Stupica (Slovenia)

translated from Slovenian by Andrej Peric (Arc Publications)

– Lucia Stupica’s 4th book of poetry comes after a decade of silence allowing her poetic voice to become more complex and sensitive to the cracks in time and in the world through which she observes fragments of life – imperfect, painful and real. Her expression retains its tenderness, establishing a deep dialogue with the world, the past and the present, with appearances and the things they conceal.

In an attempt at a new understanding of the world, Stupica writes of the role of women as the hidden movers of history, and the role of those, be they a man, a child or a random stranger, who see the experience of the other, and are open to it. These poems of love, loss, mystery and what lies beyond our understanding make for a haunting and memorable collection in Andrej Peric’s beautiful translation.

We Do Not Part, Han Kang (South Korea)

translated from Korean by e.yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK)

– One morning in December, Kyungha is called to her friend Inseon’s hospital bedside. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation following a wood-chopping accident, Inseon is bedridden and begs Kyungha to take the first plane to her home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, who will quickly die unless it receives food.

As Kyungha arrives a snowstorm hits. Lost in a world of snow, she begins to wonder if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. She doesn’t yet suspect the darkness awaiting at her friend’s house.

There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive, documenting the terrible massacre 70 years before that saw 30,000 Jeju civilians murdered.

We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all a powerful indictment against forgetting.

* * * * * *

I have not read any of these titles, though I have read Han Kang’s extraordinary Human Acts, which this new novel reminds me of. Here the Novel Prize winning author asks similar questions of humanity. Another Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk, has a new book here; I enjoyed Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, but looking out for the less familiar, I’m interested in Kurdish author Fatma Aydemir‘s Djinns and another Italian classic author Elsa Morante looks tempting, despite the length.

Now that I’ve created the summaries, I can reread them at a leisurely pace in one location.

Any that interest you from this list?

The winner will be announced at a ceremony at The Shard in London on Thursday 27th November.

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Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez tr. Megan McDowell #RIPxx

My Cemetery Journeys

Someone is Walking On Your Grave My Cemetery Journeys Mariana Enriquez

Argentinian author Mariana Enríqeuz is known for unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre, amid contemporary Argentina. Her stories are populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts and hungry women walking the troubled line between urban realism and literary horror.

Though I’ve seen her Gothic titles on the International Booker shortlist, an overactive imagination has constrained my curiosity to venture further until now.

When I saw that Granta were publishing a memoir-like collection of essays that chronicle her travels through graveyards of the world, steeped in history, legend and local culture, I was more than intrigued, I wanted to take that journey with Mariana Enriquez as my guide.

One Woman’s Obsession and Another’s

This is not fiction, it’s a journalistic travel diary, beginning with her first teenage encounter in Genoa, Italy, spanning years of visits and curating the experiences that came with them, and a potted history of characters she momentarily became obsessed with while visiting 21 cemeteries across four continents.

I admit that I have my own obsession with cemeteries, though not to visit them or to seek out historical characters; my interest is in the words left behind, the clues that help me recreate a lineage.

I discovered that it is possible to do that online through ‘Find a Grave’, another way to find ancestors and fill in the gaps in a family tree, creating one’s own virtual cemeteries populated with the memorials of those who came before.

Lest we forget or should we never have known and have a compulsion to awaken our soul remembering. I visit these virtual creations, solve some of their mysteries and see into the lives of those forgotten, as if they were there, tapping me on the shoulder inviting me to come and witness how it was.

A Goth Flaneur Coming of Age

From that very first essay about her journey as a 25-year-old to Italy with her mother I was hooked. Mariana Enriquez described herself as a ‘goth‘ from about the age of six years old and in her book, travels to cities and obscure locations around the world with the aim of visiting a place of rest, unravelling stories as she goes.

In her gripping, journalistic style, she shares why each graveyard was important to visit, whether part of an interesting historical aspect, or because of a particular personality, or a rumour about the strange things that allegedly happen there. It surprised me initially that many of these places require security, some even have ticket offices, because strange things can happen in broad daylight as well as the dead of night.

Each essay gives the country and location of the cemetery and the year she visited and sometimes there is a photo of a particularly interesting sculpture. In an NPR interview with Ayesha Rascoe, she expanded on her youthful inclinations and inspiration in seeking out these places of rest.

Reading Edgar Allen Poe – and then with the years, I learned that also cemeteries have a lot to say about life, about the history of the people. And then Argentina in the ’70s, the decade where I was born, had a dictatorship that made a lot of bodies disappear. Therefore, there’s a generation of people that were killed by the government, and they don’t have a grave.

I realized that that trauma, that is very engraved in my life, somehow made me feel that a grave, a tombstone – it’s something of comfort. It’s a final thing in a good way.

Death and the Maiden, Staglieno

So it begins with Death and the Maiden, Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, Genoa in 1997 and this essay is literally the initial seduction into the collection, Mariana’s mother had enough money to take her first trip to Europe and invited her daughter along.

Genoa wasn’t her priority; when read of the places in Italy that were, I’m drawn down literary, art and historical rabbit holes in delight. But Staglieno at least had graves that featured on the cover Joy Division‘s single Love Will Tear Us Apart, even if she had never liked them.

In a public square in Genoa is where she meets the perfect goth boy playing violin, an Italian Englishman, like a creature out of Mary Shelley or Byron. Someone to accompany her on her pilgrimage.

Enzo was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. At least for me, for my idea of beauty, which is shadowy and pale and pliant, black and blue, a little moribund but happy, more dusk than night.

Welsh Immigrants in Patagonia

When Enriquez travels to Trevelin Cemetery in Chubut, Agentina, 2009, I learn about the Welsh who left their homeland to settle in Patagonia in 1865. Having been exploited and discriminated against in the United Kingdom and fearing losing their language and identity, 153 Welsh men, women and children boarded the ship Mimosa and arrived in a place that was something of a disappointment, but became the most significant Welsh colony in Argentine Patagonia.

I learn about characters from this group, the little known history that explains the proliferation of Jones, Thomas and Evans, the foreign words on the gravestones, in a place where many today still speak Welsh.

The Mountains of San Sebastian to Rottnest Island

From English soldiers buried in forest graves on a Basque mountain near San Sebastian in Spain, I read of more minor historical events and wonder about the meaning of the words on the chapel, “Every hour wounds; the last one kills.” So many stories and mystery among the remains.

In 2007, she accompanies her Australian boyfriend Paul who works as a bike mechanic on Rottnest Island, half an hour from Freemantle in Western Australia. A stable, long distance relationship that is headed towards marriage and an outsider’s view of a curious part of the world where the lead singer of AC/DC came of age, went to jail and is buried. She wants to see his grave.

The place has a booming real estate market, houses with yards full of healing crystals and fairies, collectors of all kinds who exhibit their cabinets of curiosities in the streets, artists, musicians, and a sparse but continuously fluctuation itinerant population linked to the port – people who can be unhinged, unstable and on occasion violent.

Weirded out by the hotel-asylum they’re staying in, she takes the ferry to the island, once inhabited by the Noongar Aborginal people, also used as a prison and visits the burial grounds, unearthing more story of post-colonial and indigenous poeples.

Savannah to New Orleans to Cuba to Edinburgh

I don’t wish this make this overly long, because I feel like I could write paragraphs on every essay; they are so interesting, quirky, incredible and speak so much to the different cultures they inhabit, from a very different perspective than what anyone would usually encounter visiting a foreign country.

If you came from New Orleans, I guess you would know about the vibrant characters that inhabit it, both the living and the dead. I did not know that it is the site of the second most visited grave in American after Elvis, that of the 19th century midwife, herbalist and philanthropic Voodoo practitioner of French, Spanish and African origins Marie Laveau.

Then there was the controversy surrounding the Pietro Gualdi marble sculpture of a seated woman in a robe holding a bouquet of flowers that Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda requested permission from the Italian Society to use in the tomb scene of Easy Rider. Suffice to say all requests since then have been denied. And Nicholas Cage’s pyramid? A pharaonoic tomb waiting for a body.

Frankfurt was brief, Cuba was fascinating and macabre and sad after the friend who hosted her became the first close associate whom death claimed. Savannah was touristy and disappointing, I mean how could the book cover of John Berendt’s novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil have caused such havoc and chaos to a place of rest?

Edinburgh was crowded, full of folklore; people visiting the graves of random names J.K.Rowling chose as characters for her Harry Potter books. Bizarre comes in so many different forms, real, imagined and just because.

Taphophilia Syndrome and the Magnificent Seven

I learn a new word. Taphophile, people who are passionate about cemeteries, memorials, and the history they hold. And Taphophilia syndrome? An abnormal attraction for graves. Who knew there were so many?

The visit to London’s Highgate cemetery fascinated me because I lived so close to it for some years, yet never had an inclination to visit. Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, set in the cemetery sat unread on my shelf for years. To read about it here and what the author encountered there was like stepping into another realm, as all these places are, existing in the in-between.

Highgate and London’s Magnificent Seven created from 1833-1841 just demonstrated to me how little the living can be aware of the cult of the dead right next door.

Day of the Dead 1-2 November

Mexico seems to be the only country that retains a feeling of celebration around the departed. Though she visits and writes of its traditions, Enriquez has never been there for the Day of the Dead, when souls return and are welcomed to their family home to eat with their living relatives.

Here in France 1 November is the public holiday Toussaint (All Saint’s Day) and there is a mass visitation to cemeteries all over the country, when families visit, tidy up, pay their respects and bring chrysanthemum’s to family graves.

The Mexican anthropologist Alfonso Alfaro said, “We are a people who maintain a privileged relationship with death.” And the art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragon wrote:

Death is a universal theme of human expression. Mexico’s feeling toward death, the familiarity, tenderness and simplicity in its treatment of death, its obsession, which it sees as neither tragic nor funereal, but rather nuptial and natal, imbued with an immediate everydayness, an imperious and serene visibility, characterized more by cascading laughter than lamentation – it all harbours the unlearned wisdom of a cosmic and playful conceptualization, as if in perpetual amazement, that is particular to Mexico.

Prague to Paris to Eva Peron and the Disappeared

Prague has its legends but is overrun by tourists; Mariana resists and admits maybe it’s because she’s not a fan of Kafka.

In Paris, I hear of the fascinating history and grisly dilemma of 12th century Holy Innocents Cemetery in the Les Halles quarter that lead to the creation of the Montmartre catacombs. And a visit down there.

Eventually the journey comes full circle to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the aristocratic Recoleta Cemetery, where Eva Peron is buried. Described once as ‘Venice without the canals’ it has ostentatious vaults like palaces along narrow streets, where everything is above ground, a way of showing off grandeur.

Peron’s journey there is an enthralling tale of body snatching, written about in Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez. A macabre story, it is one that Enriquez shares with freinds visiting the cemetery, one she told her husband Paul on their first date, that turned into a second date, though not everyone reacts that well she admits.

The Appartition of Marta Angélica

Part of the reason to write these stories came from reflections when her friend’s mother’s remains were identified after being found in a mass grave, having disappeared thirty-five years previously, kidnapped, disappeared and presumed killed, by the military dictatorship in Argentina.

“for someone like me who grew up in a dictatorship that had the peculiarity of making bodies disappear,” the idea of a tomb and of a cemetery was overshadowed by the political trauma.

The idea of no burial, no grave, no funeral rite, that’s what’s traumatic for me.”

Thank you for patiently reading, if you made it this far.

I absolutely loved and was riveted by this book of essays. I read it over the course of a month or so, it was too interesting and thought provoking and worldwide encompassing to read too quickly. It surprised me how compelling it was, with the right blend of personal story, characters met on her travels, fascinating known and unknown history and the insights into different cultural rituals and treatment of the subject of death, burial and even the movement and perceived ownership of or control over bodies. It gives even more meaning to those letters RIP.

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

Mariana Enríquez Essay: Notes on Craft – on writing dark fiction

NPR Interview : ‘Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave’ – a journey to cemeteries across 4 continents

Author, Mariana Enríquez

Mariana Enríquez is an award-winning Argentine novelist and journalist, whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

She is the author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Our Share of Night was awarded the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela.

“People often ask me why I like to write dark fiction. Horror. Weird tales… There is something about horror and dark fiction that is familiar and homely, and at the same time, always audacious. It’s with this language that I can explain myself and explain what I worry about.”

N.B. This book was an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

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Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó (Hungary) tr. George Szirtes

A few catch up reviews from August 2025’s Women in Translation month. I realised I’ve mentioned them elsewhere but not here. The link above has a summary of all the novels I read during #WITMonth with links to reviews. So many of them were excellent 5 star reads, the 3 Italian novels, the Mexican, French.

Hungarian Literature in Translation

Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad (2014), translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes was originally published in Hungary in 1963 and brought to English fifty years later in 2014. She was the most translated Hungarian author, brought back to popularity thanks to Len Rix’s translations of her novels Abigail (2020) and The Door (2006) and Katalin street (2017).

It is the story of traditional villager Ettie and her daughter Iza, who lives in Budapest and the sequence of events in the wake of the death of Ettie’s husband Vince, when the daughter swiftly moves her mother away from the countryside and her familiar community to the city, where everything will be taken care of.

The news arrived just as she was toasting bread.

Three years earlier Iza had sent them a clever little machine that plugged into the wall and made the bread come out a pale pink; she’d turned the contraption this way and that, examined it for a while, then stowed it on the bottom shelf of the kitchen cupboard, never to use it again.

Thrust into a Modern Era

Ettie’s grief finds no solace in the new situation, baffled by the ways of her daughter and the city, where she struggles to find her place or role to assuage her loss. Even getting outside for fresh air becomes a source of anxiety due to the confusion of not knowing the area, the traffic, the transport system. Teréz who cooks, is hostile doesn’t want her in the kitchen or cleaning, no one wants her old-fashioned coffee or help.

She understood how an old woman rapidly heading towards eighty, who had spent all her life on firm ground, coping with straight forward problems, would now feel as though her life were hanging by a thread, and she also understood the bitterness she must be feeling, a bitterness she had never articulated in words that must have been there all the time: she was, after all, an old but still active woman, and she was in mourning. Having established the nature of their relationship, Teréz wanted to show her some tenderness without endangering her own importance and position.

How Not to Age Gracefully

Photo by N. Emmert Pexels.com

Written in four parts, Earth, Fire, Water, Air, the narrative hops back and forth from present to past as we grow to understand the family, their relationships and the great divide between their generations and the lives they lead.

The story moves slowly through Vince’s illness and past and then speeds up with his demise as Ettie is literally thrust into a new era.

She was right, she was always right, it was just that old people grow fond of things that mean much more to them than the young.

A Formidable Daughter

Iza is an adept busy Doctor, divorced, childless, has a night companion and is extremely independent. Employing teréz to take care of all her domestic arrangements, she wants her mother to be looked after and not to have to do a thing, believing she should appreciate that.

Photo by J. Mahnke on Pexels.com

One activity at a time she tries to find her role, only to be continuously rebuffed. Everything is taken care of and the effect as she pulls back from one potential helpful chore after the other is a slow deterioration of all ‘joie de vivre’. Her daughter’s efficiency removes all chance of Ettie helping out and efforts to do so, create more problems, further undermining the elderly mother’s sense of well-being.

She felt as if some elemental blow had destroyed everything around her and that only now did she really know what it was to be a widow, someone absolutely abandoned.

Return to One’s Roots

book cover of Magda Szabo's Iza's Ballad Hungarian literature in translation

When she hears the headstone is ready for placement, Ettie makes plans for her return. It is quite a revelation to her for everything to feel so familiar and so strange at the same time. But her time away has hastened her decline and things don’t go as smoothly as she would have liked.

There’s so much more to the story and the backstory of the character’s that leads them to the predicament they are in by the time Ettie reaches widowhood. It’s an incredibly well portrayed depiction of the sudden transition of the aging mother from her simple village home to the modern convenience of her daughter’s third floor apartment in Budapest, and the effect that removing an elderly person from their familiar environment and from the process of transitioning can have.

Thought provoking and reflective, with an element of tension as the status quo can not be supported, it’s an excellent novel that captures an important and little acknowledged societal shift, of a dying era and of interesting mother daughter power dynamics.

Have you read any good Hungarian novels?

Further Reading

The Grande Dame: Magda Szabó – A Portrait

Author, Magda Szabó

Hungarian novelist, essayist, poet and literary translator Magda Szabó was born in Debrecen, Austria–Hungary in 1917 and died in 2007. She began her literary career as a poet and disappeared from the publishing scene in the 1950’s for political reasons, making a living teaching and translating from French to English.

She began writing novels and in 1978 was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary. Her novel The Door won the Prix Feminina Etranger in France and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and made into a film starring Helen Mirren.

She lived a long, eventful life decorated with many outstanding achievements in the field of literature, with several of her books being translated into more than 40 languages.

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The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar (Iran) tr. Anonymous

In Feb 2020 I read Shokoofeh Azar’s epic debut novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (my review) translated from Farsi. An Iranian writer living in exile in Australia, I was excited to have the opportunity to read a brilliant work of imagination in English. It was later shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (UK), longlisted for a National Book Award for Translated Literature (US) and three Australian Book Awards including the Stella Prize.

Iranian literature The Gowkaran tree in the middle of our kitchen by shokoofeh Azar
Translated Fiction International Booker Prize

Epic and challenging, both that novel and this latest both use elements of magic realism in a unique way to explore recent history, (that of the Iranian Revolution in 1979), while referencing mythic texts and ancient aspects of Iranian culture, which an outsider won’t necessarily pick up on them all, but how incredible a feat, to maintain a compelling plotline that explores the past and uses the metaphysical to assist with confronting situations that are painful to contemplate, creating meaning and helping to overcome trauma.

“Magical realism is not only a realm of boundless imagination, it is also a powerful literary and cultural tool for resisting dominant and imposed powers… I turn to this genre to confront authoritarian structures in Iran while celebrating the true cultural and artistic beauty of my country.”

Preserving a Culture Through Storytelling

Again in The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, Azar writes to embrace and acknowledge family, a beautifully diverse and colourful culture, complex politics, revolution and resistance.

The novel tells a story about a Zoroastrian family with twelve children and a long, interwoven lineage, where the living and the dead are both present and absent, sometimes called on or observed when needed to understand how to navigate the present. Those living in the now are often less aware than those who came before and this connection with their heritage and family is part of the way they survive difficult times.

The story starts with the strange occurrence of a Gowkaran Tree appearing one day in their bustling kitchen, travelling up towards the ceiling, alive with bird life and firmly rooted.

No one but family can see the tree, and while making repairs, their father, a University Professor decides to build a round table around the trunk. The kitchen was their centre and beneath the walls of the old mansion lay the remains of eleven other mansions.

A big, twelve-person table. In this way the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life, the Bas-Tokhmeh Tree, the Gowkaran Tree, the Tree of the Incident, became the kitchen’s centre of gravity.

The grandmother Khanom Joon tells her granddaughter (the narrator Shokoofeh) some of the old family stories, of love and storytelling and the 1,762 notebooks containing the memoirs of their ancestors. She tells her own story and that of the Ball of Light that follows her.

“Curled up in a chair, I let history go and breathed in the air of love and suddenly realised that from now on I was caught. That said, in my dreams I had seen that this madness would grip us both, neither of knowing when it began or how long it would go on. Just like this mansion and this timeless tree and the history of foreigner’s incursions and invasions in this country.”

A Heroine on a Quest, Mentors Abound

I’m not going to even attempt to describe too much of the plot, suffice to say that it is something of the heroine’s journey for the young narrator, who is in the throes of falling in love and will be sent on a quest to search for her brother Mehab, who has gone to fight in the war. A coming-of-age story in harsh times, and yet a celebration of that which continues to resist and persevere and give fruit.

The journey brings to light the terror of a country taken over by despots, and the predicaments of those who capitulate and those who refuse, the voiceless and the silenced. And throughout the Gowkaran Tree remains, rooted, alive and bringing those who remain together.

Why Trees Matter

Trees are a recurring motif in Shokoofeh Azar’s novels. Trees often live on longer than humans, just as our ancestral lineage does, they are places of refuge and transendence.

Photo by Vraj Shah on Pexels.com

The rootedness of a big tree in the middle of a kitchen is a symbol of resistance, of strength and the power of deep, familial roots. Its central presence helps preserve what is under threat – family heritage, culture and identity.

The earthy, rooted tree grounds the magical realism element, allowing the author to meander into myth and folklore without losing the connection to the aspects of the story that are firmly rooted in reality. The reader surrenders and goes with it, relieved by the presence of the Ball of Light and terrified by the danger our protagonist is exposed to on her solo journey.

Destiny and Liberty

The book is made up of 27 chapters in two parts, Part One The Womb of Destiny takes place in and around the home mansion and in Part Two The Ordeal of Liberty, our protagonist is sent out alone on her mission to overcome challenges and learn something before her return.

“The way is reached by taking it.”

Book cover of The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar

If you’ve read her earlier works, you’ll be prepared for how unique the storytelling is, but if you’re not a fan of magic realism, this might challenge, however for me it was worth it for the immersion in the storytelling, culture and literary tradition, even if not all the references are familiar. The occasional footnotes are helpful.

The way the plot takes the reader on the journey to save a brother, while encountering historical characters along the way reads like a blend of fable and adventure with philosophical insights mitigating the challenging obstacles required to overcome.

At 512 pages, I admit that once I was out of holiday mode, I set it aside, due to the sheer size of it. I do think it asks a lot from readers today to engage with such a massive book.

Shokoofeh Azar has developed a unique style of magic realism to narrate harsh truths about a society under political and cultural oppression, while sharing its depths of family unity, cultural heritage and dedication to resistance. Overall, I highly recommend it and look forward to where she goes next and hope for a more taut, less ambitious novel next time.

Further Reading

Review: World Literature Today : The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Andrew Martino

Read a great review at Tony’s Reading List

Iranian Daughters: Struggling for the Rights Their Mothers Lost in the Revolution by Sepideh Zamani

Video Conversation : After the Revolution, Edinburgh Book Festival

Shokoofeh Azar, Author

Born in Iran in 1972, the author worked as a journalist and field reporter in her country, covering human rights issues. After several arrests in connection with her work as a journalist, on advice from her family, she fled Iran in 2010 and was granted asylum in Australia, where she has lived as a political refugee since.

She is the author of essays, articles, and children’s books, and is the first Iranian woman to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road.

N.B. Thank you to Europa Editions for the review copy.

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The Song of Youth by Montserrat Roig tr. Tiago Miller

The Song of Youth ‘el cant de la joventut’ is a slim collection of short stories written by Montserrat Roig translated by Tiago Miller, published in English in 2022 by fum de stampa press (originally published in Catalan in 1989).

It was shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, (now rebranded the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize) that rewards ‘bold and innovative’ literary fiction by small presses publishing 12 or fewer titles a year that are independent of any other commercial financial entity.

The winner of that prize in 2025 was There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (Ile de Reunion), translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert and in 2024 Of Cattle and Men (reviewed here) by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry, published by Charco Press.

Finding and Reading Catalan literature in Catalonia

Backstory Bookstore Barcelona

When I visited the Backstory Bookshop in Barcelona, I was interested in and looking for Catalan literature that embraced something of its history in some way.

Monserrat Roig (1946-1991) was a novelist, short story writer, investigative journalist and feminist activist widely regarded as forming a central part of the Catalan canon, inspiring many other Catalonian writers to seek the intimate, personal testimonies of ordinary people, within a wider version of history guided by a strong sociopolitical engagement.

One of Roig’s many literary strengths was creating and placing subversive characters in deeply philosophical and provocative narratives, and bringing out their flawed, tender and very real aspects. It is helpful to consider this when reading her bold collection of short stories.

I’m going to mention two out of the collection that really stayed with me, The Song of Youth and Mar. Love and Ashes packs a punch, but is so short, it need not be described here.

The Song of Youth

I found it helpful to be reminded of this context, written on the back of the book.

In The Song of Youth, Montserrat Roig boldly presents eight remarkable stories that use language as a weapon against political and social “dismemory.” Her powerful and striking prose allows the important stories of those silenced by the brutal Franco regime to, at last, come to the fore. The Song of Youth is undoubtedly feminist and deeply critical but, as always, Roig’s lyrical writing gives shape, depth, and significance to the human experience.

This is how author Eva Baltasar described the collection:

The Song of Youth represents an array of lagoons in which Montserrat Roig’s most extraordinary flowers lay their roots.”

The short story collection by Montserrat Roig The Song of Youth Catalan literature translated fiction

After the first reading of each story, I felt like I was sitting at the edge of one of those lagoons, firstly appreciating the flowers, though not always seeing those roots in the deep, dark depths. And so I went back and reread them. I wrote on and around the pages, and looked up the poetic literary references and was in awe.

The opening story, The Song of Youth, reread a few times, revealed its many layers with each reading. It is magnificent. I think it is a story that needs to read quietly to concentrate, like contemplating a work of art, it won’t reveal itself at a first glimpse. However, it is perfect as it is. A celebration of dying moments and the power of memory, of a life lived courageously.

I turn my face from the ominous day,
Before it comes, everlasting night,
So lifeless, it’s long since passed away.

But shimmering faith renews my fight,
And I turn, with joy, towards the light,
Along galleries of deepest memory.
JOSEP CARNER, Absence

A woman lying prone in hospital with her eyes closed, near the end of her life, observes the white coat of the Doctor and has flashbacks to her youth, a stranger in a white shirt walked into the bar where she sat with her parents, with a decisive air. A transgression.

The men who came from the war didn’t have that air.

She opens her eyes, she is still alive. Everything as it was when she closed them. She knows the sounds. The sounds that keep them alive and the sounds that warn of encroaching death.

“They all died at daybreak. Just like the night.”

She is defiant. She is determined to remember a word. She succeeds.

It’s not easy to describe, this too is a story that needs to be experienced, to read the clues and the disjointed moments of the present and past that create the whole.

Death, Memory and Friendship

To Montserrat Blanes

Life has taught me to think but thinking has not taught me to live. HERZEN

The story MAR is the hardest hitting and most powerful – about a woman befriended, a relationship, admiration, of two people who are unalike but drawn towards each other, who go their own ways; until an accident changes everything.

…it never once occurred to me to give a name to that period of silence, madness and noise, to those moments when the hours would melt into timelessness and our intellectual friends, while watching us, would frown or raise an eyebrow.
“They’ve got some nerve,” said their suspicious eyes while they stared, unaware of their own fear.

The time they are together changes the one telling the story, she is an intellectual, always analysing everything, living in a world of opinions and judgments. While in this friendship, something shifts, changes her. The presence of this unconventional friend disturbed others, messing up the carefully compiled archives on their minds. From vastly different worlds, they each gain something powerful from being in each other’s lives. Something that unsettles others.

We hardly said a word, we certainly didn’t reinvent anything, but it was only with her that I lost my fear, the fear of revealing who I believe myself to be, that little girl I keep hidden in the deep, damp depths of my inner self.

A friendship of silences, commotion and madness

A tribute to friendship, this story originally published in 1989, was celebrated in December 2021 when a documentary was produced about Montserrat Roig and Montserrat Blanes friendship of silences, commotion and madness.

The audiovisual is made up of two narratives, the one in the short story and that told through the live voice and presence of Montserrat Blanes speaking from experience, memory and remembrance.

If you understand Catalan, you can watch and listen to the recording of “Roig i Blanes. Una amistat de silencis, enrenou i bogeria” on Youtube here.

Overall a powerful and thought provoking collection that makes me keen to read her longer fiction.

Further Reading

Biography: Amb uns altres ulls (With Other Eyes) by Betsabé Garcia (2016)

Article: Montserrat Roig : Up-close and from afar by Mercè Ibarz

“And when cancer attacked her, the hour of relentless truth that is illness brought out the self-portrait that the public persona had been hiding: a lucid, serene, combative writer and an excellent reader, who was cognisant of the fact that Franco’s dictatorship had pulled literary training up at its roots and who was, therefore, all too aware of her limits to that point and the power that, despite her illness, journalistic prose could give her.” Mercè Ibarz

Author, Montserrat Roig

Montserrat Roig (Barcelona, 1946-1991) was an award-winning writer and journalist, and the recipient of numerous prestigious prizes including the Premi Víctor Català and the Premi Sant Jordi.

Her journalistic work focused on forging a creative feminist tradition, and on recovering the country’s political history.

Her novels take similar stances, reflecting on the need to liberate women who were silenced by history.

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Women in Translation month #WITMonth

Every novel I’ve read in translation this month has been exceptional. I do love August for seeing what others are reading in this category to ensure I have a future supply of excellent reads originating from elsewhere, coming from other languages.

Here’s what I hope to read this month and I’d love to hear your favourites, what you’ve read and loved or are looking forward to during WIT Month or any time!

Translation Opens World Views

Covers of books ftom the shelf of novels by women in translation

I find it such an immense privilege to have the opportunity to read a novel that was originally conceived and written in another language, that can naturally dive into perspectives from other cultures that might be completely different or universally connected.

I loved norms being challenged and insights shared, new words, cultural references, all those opportunities to expand one’s awareness.

So I gathered what I had on my shelf to read for August to share here and I am very grateful to Daniela at Europa Editions UK who sent me three excellent new publications published by Europa in 2025, which arrived just as the month started, two of which I have devoured already.

Read Around the World

The books I have chosen are by women from Mexico (translated from Spanish), Rome and Abruzzo in Italy, Barcelona (Catalan), France (French), Iran (living as a political refugee in Australia, translated from Farsi), Russia living in Berlin (translated from German) and Debrecen, Hungary.

Mexico

I started the month with Guadalupe Nettel’s (Mexico) excellent autobiographical novel The Body Where I Was Born (reviewed here) translated by J.T. Lichtenstein, a book that reads like a memoir of childhood and adolescence, but from the perspective of looking at how those various experiences she had, might have moulded her character.

The real surprise was when she and her brother join her mother to come and live here in Aix en Provence while she’s working towards a PhD. Very insightful and for me, utterly riveting. You can also read Still Born (reviewed here) shortlisted in 2023 for the International Booker, hers is a voice and style I adore.

Italy

I’ve definitely been in a phase of reading Italian women writers from the 30’s and 40’s, so of course there is more Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes in my pile for this month.

I’ve already finished There’s No Turning Back (reviewed here) translated by Ann Goldstein, a novel of eight women entering adulthood and potential independence in the face of a society that wants women to stay traditional, and I’m looking forward to Ginzburg’s novel All Our Yesterdays about a pregnant 16 year old who marries an older family friend to save her reputation.

I recently read an excellent article about Italy’s feminist history and literature by Margarita Diaz, who after reading Elena Ferrante’s essay collection In the Margins, sought out a women’s bookstore collective, the Libreria delle Donne di Milano, whose work had been a source of inspiration for her Neapolitan novels. The bookstore occupies a unique place in the history of the Italian women’s movement, having established “an alternative genealogy of culture,” a perspective quite different to that of English speaking cultural feminism. I would love to visit this bookshop.

The Libreria delle Donne di Milano (The Milan Women’s Bookstore), on Via Pietro Calvi in the Zona Risorgimento, houses more than 7,500 carefully curated works, mostly in Italian, by 3,700 female writers from all around the world. Works by icons of Italian literature like Sibilla Aleramo, Grazia DeLedda, and Elena Ferrante sit next to translated copies of works by anglophone writers like Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. It is a refreshing, unapologetic, women-only space, where female voices are celebrated and encouraged. 

My third Italian read, more contemporary, with a flashback to events of the 90’s is the Strega Prize 2024 winning novel The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (reviewed here), also translated by Ann Goldstein.

Her novels are excellent. A Girl Returned was exceptional, and I was riveted reading this latest. Historical true crime inspired and a psychological exploration of the effect of traumatic events on the individual and community and the small actions that help heal – just brilliant.

Doesn’t that mountain look like our local Mount Saint Victoire, with the cross at the summit?

France

It being a busy and hot working summer, I was also looking for lighter reads that would be captivating and so I chose Virginie Grimaldi’s second novel All That Remains (my review here) translated by Hildegarde Serle, a story of three people whose paths cross when each is at a significant turning point. Jeanne (74) is widowed and is overwhelmed, Iris (33) has made a near-escape and is in hiding, and Théo (18) working in a boulangerie (bakery) is starting out having left a boy’s home.

I was particularly interested in this after having seen French a news item about inter generational living arrangements, where young people move in with the elderly, enabling them to stay in their own homes. This was a page turner, totally feel good, brilliant and uplifting, a perfect all year round read!

Catalan, Spain

In February, visiting Barcelona, I found my way to the BackStory Bookshop where I discovered works in Catalan translated into English. The Song of Youth (reviewed here) by Montserrat Roig (1946-1991) translated by Tiago Miller is a collection of eight stories, which I have already started and I am pencil scribbling all over, they are so, so good.

Looking back at that lower bookshelf in the bookstore, from where I obtained this volume, I wish I had bought Time of the Cherries as well, one I’ve seen reviewed by Jacqui and more recently, Goodbye, Ramona. The latter, wasn’t in the store, but I have recently found and ordered a copy. Those Fum de Stampa Press editions are gorgeous but not easy to find!

Iran

Delighted to see a new bold chunkster translated from Farsi by Shokoofeh Azar, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen (reviewed here). This one, spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, is described as a lush, layered story embracing politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love amid the colourful stories of twelve children, each told against the backdrop of cultural and political change.

Having loved her earlier novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree shortlisted for the International Booker (2020) and The Stella Prize, I’m saving this 500 page epic for holiday week at the end of August.

Russia

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine was the second novel written by Alina Bronsky, a German novelist born in the Ural mountain area of Russia, a dark, funny novel that stars Rosalinda, the irrepressible tyrant babushka who’ll stop at nothing to keep her family from emigrating without her as the Soviet Union falls apart. She’s brutal and cunning but also induces sympathy and amusement. This has been on my shelf too long and reading this NYT interview has pushed me to want to read it.

“Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things,” Bronsky says. “I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course Russians. It’s despair — just keep laughing, until you are dead.”

Hungary

Lastly another that’s been waiting a while to be picked up is Magda Szabo’s Iza’s Ballad translated by George Szirtes, about a woman whose daughter insists she leaves her countryside home after her husband’s death to move to the city of Budapest. Uprooted from her community she must make a place and a life for herself anew.

I read her novel The Door some years ago and enjoyed it, so I’m looking forward to visiting Budapest and the countryside she left for it.

Recommendations

That’s my pile of potential reads for August, let us know in the comments below if you have read any of these or what you are looking forward to.

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The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio tr. Ann Goldstein

Having very much enjoyed her previous two novels translated into English A Girl Returned (my review) and A Sister’s Story (my review), I jumped at the chance to read her latest, winner of the 2024 Strega Prize, a novel inspired by a historic true-crime event in the 90’s, a double femicide in the mountainous region of the Abruzzo Apennines in Italy, a novel dedicated to “all the women who survive”.

Brittle or Fragile, the Impact of Events

l'età fragile The Brittle Age Donatella Di Pietrantonio Abruzzo Europa Editions winner of the 2024 Strega Prize

When the novel opens, its first three chapters, just over a page each, touch on everything to come, Lucia’s daughter Amanda who has returned from Milan on one of the last trains as the pandemic shuts everything down, she stays in her room, barely eats, doesn’t talk, her phone uncharged under the bed. Lucia worries but can get nothing out of her.

Lucia visits her elderly widowed father, who lives in the house she was born, halfway between the town and the mountain. They walk up there and he reminds her all this will be hers one day too, land he owns that he no longer wants responsibility for.

An alarm signal arises from my stomach to my throat, suffocating me.
“That’s impossible. You sold this land.”
He tried for a long time, he confesses, without success.
I’m silent for a while, in the chorus of birds. At regular intervals the cuckoo solos.
“After what happened no one wanted it, I couldn’t give it away,” he says, as if to justify himself.
“I don’t want it either, it’s a frightening place.”
I’ve raised my voice, the last syllables echo. It will be mine of necessity, I’m his only heir.

Eighteen months before, the excitement of her daughter’s departure for Milan, the city where life would open up and happen for her, a grandfather’s pride. Now in quarantine, returned and nothing like that ambitious young woman that had left.

The Present Awakens the Past

Amanda’s reclusiveness awakens Lucia’s memories of those events of 30 years ago and throughout the novel, we learn not only what happened, but of the guilt Lucia carries for her absence and the heaviness that surviving the tragedy cost her friend, who, to make a better life left the place that held those terrible memories.

She doesn’t want to be seen in the town, people said of her, after the crime. No one mentions her anymore now. They’ve all forgotten Doralice and her story. The young people of Amanda’s age never knew her. Our parents didn’t help us stay connected.

With the memories come scenes that depict generational ways of living, ways of being, some things that stay the same, the things that change, the reasons some stay, while others leave.

Photo by Serafettin on Pexels.com

Lucia recalls trying not to worry about her daughter in the city alone, allowing her her freedom, throwing herself into her work to stop herself taking the train after her. But now she questions whether she underestimated the impact of something that happened to her.

I consoled her as well as I could, from a distance. That time, I really was wrong not to get on a train. Respecting her freedom, I failed her when she needed me. Some boundaries are too subtle for an indecisive mother like me. But do the most stable parents know at every moment the truth of what to do?
“Don’t worry, it will pass,” and I believed her.

Although the story is about a crime, the mystery of what happens sits alongside the portrait of a fractured family and community, all impacted by the past, burying it with silence.

A sacred forest in the south of France, hiking trails in forest mountain areas Italy, France

Our birthplace had protected us for a long time, or maybe that had been a false impression. We grew up in a single night.

The return of Amanda, interest in the mountain property from a developer and a need for resolution, ultimately brings the community together in an act that will work to heal wounds and create momentum for a new era.

The novel is told in five parts: Amanda, The Girls, Dente del Lupo, The Flight, and The Concert in short chapters, going back and forth in time, revealing aspects of the past of Amanda (recent) and her mother (long ago), while witnessing the changed state of their present and their dual need for healing.

The slow reveal of the tragic murders, alongside understanding how it impacted our narrator, plus her own awakening to the effect of that suppressed event, from the safer distance of 30 years in the future, is skillfully blended with the present day psychological suffering of her daughter, as they move towards recovering.

I thought this was so well portrayed, blending the mystery of tragic events, with inter-generational trauma and present day personal struggles, facing the difficulty of breaking through patterns of silence and repression, of deep caring even without understanding, of the need to forgive oneself and the dedicated perseverance of familial maternal love.

Highly Recommended.

N.B. Thank you to Europa Editions UK for sending me a copy of the novel for review.

Author, Donatella Di Pietrantonio

Donatella Di Pietranonio lives in Penne, Abruzzo, where she practices as a pediatric dentist. She began publishing books in 2011, at the age of 49. In the span of a little more than a decade, she has come to the attention of Italian critics and readers, winning the Campiello Prize with her third novel L’Arminuta (A Girl Returned) in 2017. A Sister’s Story was shortlisted for the prestigious Strega Prize and The Brittle Age the 2024 winner of the Strega and Strega Youth Prize. Her short fiction has been published by Granta Italy.

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There’s No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes tr. Ann Goldstein (2025)

Every novel I’ve read by Alba de Céspedes has been excellent and this controversial debut (at the time of its original publication in Italy, 1938) brims with the seeds of what was to come from her work, starting with this excellent, collective coming-of-age, of eight, twenty-something year old women in pre-war Rome.

I pre-ordered this novel, as she is a favourite author, of whose work I want to read everything, sharing now for WIT Month (Women in Translation).

Literature and Morality

Feminism Journal writing Womens Rights Italian Literature

In the informative translator’s note at the beginning of the book, Ann Goldstein shares some of the historical context within which the book became an immediate and immensely popular bestseller, despite the authorities finding the novel’s breaking of female stereotypes and suggestion of other possible pathways for women offensive.

“By the time the novel was published the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had been in power for more than a decade. His government promoted the idea that the proper place for women was to be at home and to bear children; sposa e madre esemplare (exemplary wife and mother). While there is no overt mention of Mussolini or fascism in the novel, none of the young women conform to this female ideal. In fact, in their different ways they are challenging it, even if not intentionally or even consciously.”

Selected to win the prestigious Viareggio Literary Prize in 1939, a government order stopped it and attempted to block further editions from being published, claiming it went against ‘fascist morality’. As Margarita Diaz points out in a recent article ‘An Immoral Endeavour‘:

Vague accusations of ‘immorality’ have been, and continue to be, used by dominant institutions, governments and autocratic regimes to stifle free expression and to censor legions of books and artworks. 

Women at a Turning Point

Alba de Cespedes debut novel Theres No Rurning Back translated by Ann Goldstein from Italian

Set in Rome 1936-1938, the novel focuses on eight young women in higher education, most studying at university, who live together in convent boarding house in Rome. They have greater freedoms than school girls, with restrictions deemed appropriate for unmarried single women.

From different backgrounds they have different issues, desires and ideas about life, which they share with each other as they progress through the year and one by one prepare to leave the premises.

On the cusp of “no turning back”, concluding their theses, each must make a decision about what to do next and none of them are thinking, acting or passively accepting the route that tradition has dictated.

The mere consideration of other life avenues and the outward expression of those thoughts, the girls’ discussions with each other, in this safe and open, female community, demonstrate an important processing step in their being better informed, while equally often challenged by their peers, at this formative moment in their lives.

“In all her novels de Céspedes investigates women’s attempts to both deconstruct and construct their lives and gain a sense of themselves, as she investigated her own life.”

A Year In the Life

Photo by cottonbro studio Pexels.com

Throughout that year, the girls will learn more than just the subject of their thesis as they share and navigate the issues that arise, including their reactions to things some have kept secret. They attend mass and adhere to the curfew, then gather after lights out to talk about everything deemed pressing.

Their conversations and reflections often lead to scenes from the past, as the reader gains insight into each of the circumstances that lead each young woman to this place.

Xenia is the first to present her thesis and to leave and she does so under cover of night, severing her connection with the girls, choosing the least conventional path, allowing an older businessman to arrange a job for her and accommodation, introducing her to a different circle of associates. Her desires are revealed in one of the early exchanges with the girls:

“Some nights a kind of yearning grips me: I can’t close my eyes and I get worn out thinking how I’m caged in this cloister of nuns, while outside life is flowing, fortune passing by – who knows? – and I can’t take advantage of it. You have to jump into life head-long, grab it by the throat. I won’t ever go back to Veroli, anyway.”

No Two Paths

If Xenia’s failure and disappearance shakes the girls up, the fate of quiet Milly, who writes letters in braille to a blind organist rocks their world even more.

As soon as Papa found out about our meetings, he made me come to Rome. But I’m not unhappy here: I can play the harmonium and write to him with that device there, which is all holes, in the braille alphabet, made just for blind people. By now I can write well, and he reads my letters by running his fingers over them, like this, see?

Silvia is a high performing literature student, a favourite of the Professor, who asks her to do research on his behalf, which he presents to great acclaim, telling her she will go far.

Silvia had on her face the expression of servile gratitude typical of those who are accustomed to submission from birth. Who were her parents, after all? Scarcely more than peasants. Someone had always taken possession of their work without even saying “Thank you, well done.” Confused by that praise, Silvia would have liked to promise : “I won’t take my eyes off the books professor, I’ll even work at night”; but at that moment Belluzzi’s wife came in, carrying a cup of tea.

Mirroring and Reflecting

a woman holds a mirror a reflection
Photo by Tasha Kamrowski on Pexels.com

Emanuela has told everyone her parents are travelling in America, disappearing every Sunday to visit her five year old daughter she has told no-one about, just like her father had written to the Mother Superior of the boarding school she attends, saying his daughter was abroad.

Though she does not study, she is drawn into the literature group, who appreciate her vigilant, intuitive faculty:

which revealed and illuminated, in those who approached her, only the aspect of the self capable of inspiring a mutual sympathy. So each saw her own image reflected, as in a mirror; and although the mirror had many faces, it projected only the one that it animated. And this game of reflections was a continuous revelation for Emanuela, too, who saw rising from the depths of herself, and appearing on the surface, constantly new and until then unknown aspects of her personality. Illuminated from the outside, exposed by the contact with others, her true physiognomy emerged gradually, and in a surprising way, from the shadows.

Women as Masters of Themselves

Debut novel by Italian author Alba de Cespedes Theres No Turning Back, banned by Mussolini challenged female stereotypes in 1938 Italy

Augusta is enrolled in classes but doesn’t plan to sit the exams. She stays up late writing novels and sending them out. When Emanuela asks her how long she plans to stay, she replies:

Until I’ve done something. I go back to Sardinia only for a month or two, in summer. By now, one can’t go home anymore. Our parents shouldn’t send us to the city; afterward, even if we return, we’re bad daughters, bad wives. Who can forget being master of herself? And in our villages a woman who’s lived alone in the city is a fallen woman. Those who remained, who passed from the father’s authority to the husband’s, can’t forgive us for having had the key to our own room, going out and coming in when we want. And men can’t forgive us for having studied, for knowing as much as they do.

Vinca is from Spain and during her time with the girls, she learns from the newspaper that Spain is at war and that the young man she has been seeing will go and join the fight. These and subsequent events change her trajectory.

One by one, they have their experiences and they make their own decisions, no two the same, yet all of them having been through the process of living together and sharing their developing ideas, strengthening their positions and coming to some kind of resolution about how they will live their lives.

It’s another brilliant read by this fabulous author and one can just imagine how this book would have been devoured by many women in the era it was published, providing them insight and a form of company to their own thoughts, or provoking them in their solitude as they lived out those traditional paths and dreamed of something else.

Highly Recommended.

“Emanuela took her head in her hands. “I think that at a certain point you have to stop searching and accept yourself. Find the courage not to count on others anymore, to separate from childhood even at the cost of solitude;”
“It’s all a matter of courage, in life. If you have it, you do well to leave,” Augusta murmured, tapping the ashes from her cigarette.”

Further Reading

Cleveland Review of Books: An Immoral Endeavor: On Alba de Céspede’s “There’s No Turning Back” by Margarita Diaz, August 7, 2025

The Guardian: Resistance fighter, novelist – and Sartre’s favourite agony aunt: rediscovering Alba Céspedes by Lara Fiegel, Mar 2023

My reviews of Alba de Céspedes Forbidden Notebook and Her Side of The Story

Author, Alba de Céspedes

Alba de Céspedes (1911-97) was a bestselling Italian-Cuban novelist, poet and screenwriter.

The granddaughter of the first President of Cuba, de Céspedes was raised in Rome. Married at 15 and a mother by 16, she began her writing career after her divorce at the age of 20. She worked as a journalist throughout the 1930s while also taking an active part in the Italian partisan struggle, and was twice jailed for her anti-fascist activities.

After the fall of fascism, she founded the literary journal Mercurio and went on to become one of Italy’s most successful and most widely translated authors.

After the war, she accompanied her husband, a diplomat to the United States and the Soviet Union. She would later move to Paris, where she would publish her last two books in French and where she spent the rest of her life. She died in 1997.