November 4, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

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 27^th November.

February 25, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

International Booker Prize Longlist 2025

The International Booker Prize 2025 longlist has been announced by this years judging panel, made up of a novelist, a poet, a translator, a critic and a songwriter, all of whom cross boundaries into other art forms. In their various ways, they are steeped in the world of words.

These are the 13 books they have chosen in the first cut, from 154 books submitted – 11 novels and two collections of short stories, translated from 10 original languages representing 15 nationalities and 11 independent publishers:

The longlisted books are:

International Booker Prize longlist 2025 *© Yuki Sugiura for the Booker Prize Foundation*

The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (Palestine) translated from (Arabic) by Sinan Antoon

– The shocking premise of Azem’s novel can be summed up in a sentence: what would happen if all the Palestinians in Israel suddenly disappeared?

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance.

That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters – against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.

Spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance, critically acclaimed in its original Arabic edition, is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (Denmark) translated by Barbara J Haveland

– a woman is trapped in a time loop, waking up each morning to find it’s the 18^th of November, again and again.The first book of a planned septology. Five books have been published in Danish so far, with translations underway in over 20 countries.

She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced.

But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18th’s of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape.

There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (La Réunion) translated (French) by Karen Fleetwood & Laëtitia Saint-Loubert

– in 1980s La Réunion (an overseas department of France, in the Indian Ocean), a young girl with a zest for life rises up against her jaded, bitter parents.

La Réunion in the ’80s is a place of high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. Here, a little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents’ reign of terror and turns to school for salvation. The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own.

Rich in the history of the island’s customs and superstition and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirise the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you.

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (Romania) translated by Sean Cotter

– partly inspired by the author’s years as a teacher in Romania, spiraling into a bizarre account of history, philosophy and mathematics, with flashes of nightmarish body horror. Said to have been written in a single draft, at 627 pages, the longest book on the list.

Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, the novel grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths.

In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction and history with autobiography – the book is partly based on Cărtărescu’s experiences as a teacher – Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.

Reservoir Bitches (short stories) by Dahlia de la Cerda (Mexico) translated (Spanish) by Heather Cleary & Julia Sanches

– follows the efforts of 13 memorable Mexican woman, from the daughter of a cartel boss to a victim of transfemicide, to survive against the odds.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, 13 Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, cheat, cry and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices.

At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (France) translated by Helen Stevenson

– the fictional account of a group of migrants’ attempt to cross the English Channel in an inflatable dinghy, which results in the deaths of 27 of those on board. Told from the point of view of a French woman who received, but rejected, their desperate calls for help.

Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died.

The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?

A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Japan) translated by Polly Barton

– an unflinching account of sexual desire and disability about a protagonist born with a congenital muscle disorder who uses an electric wheelchair and a ventilator. Hailed as one of Japan’s most important novels of the 21^st century.

Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male carer reveals he has read it all – the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Her response? An indecent proposal…

Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (Japan) translated by Asa Yoneda

– leaps back and forth across thousands of years and finds humankind on the verge of extinction, but still clinging to the impulses that make us human.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Germany) translated by Daniel Bowles

– a Swiss writer named Christian, embarks on a tragicomic road trip with his wealthy, elderly mother in this tragicomic and absurd semi-autobiographical novel.

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his 80-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution. Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past.

Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair’s tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (Italy) translated by Sophie Hughes

– an expat couple attempt to live their dream in Berlin, but find themselves beset with the dissatisfaction and ennui of the modern world.

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin – in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and Berlin’s 24-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon.

Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp.

With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection is beautifully written and brilliantly scathing.

Heart Lamp (short stories) by Banu Mushtaq (Southern India) translated (Kannada) by Deepa Bhasthi

– the author, an activist and lawyer vividly captures the extraordinary everyday lives of Muslim women and girls in southern India, in 12 stories, originally published in Kannada between 1990 and 2023.

Praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer (Surinamese-Dutch), translated (Dutch) by Lucy Scott

– a classic of queer literature, as electrifying today as it was when it first appeared in 1982, tells of a courageous Black woman fleeing her abusive husband to embark a new life in the Surinamese capital.

When Noenka’s abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, she flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society’s expectations.

Amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. ‘I’m Noenka,’ she responds resolutely, ‘which means Never Again.’

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (France), translated by Mark Hutchinson

– captures the love and despair of an intense friendship between the book’s narrator and his best friend from childhood, who suffers from severe psychological disorders.

A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel.

Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in her signature style.

Newbies, First Timers and a Classic Translated

Many of the books on the list are by authors being translated into English for the first time, which is a great sign for translated fiction, indicating that publishers and reading more widely and looking further than the already known. Not surprising I haven’t read any of these and only heard of one Solenoid, which won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024. It is not one I will be reading, way too long!

I like the sound of Heart Lamp and On a Woman’s Madness, not just for their premise, but for the language and locations they hail from! The Danish novel, The Calculation of Volume 1 sounds intriguing and something of a cult following, you’ve got to bat for someone who went ahead and self-published and is now being translated into over 20 languages.

Anything on the list tempting you? Let me know in the comments below.

The International Booker Shortlist and Winner 2025

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, 8 April.

The winning title will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, 20 May.

August 23, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Fresh Dirt from the Grave by Giovanna Rivero tr. Isabel Adey

Fresh Dirt From the Grave is another Charco Press title, this time from Bolivia. It is a collection of six stories that unsettle the reader, navigating paths outside the norm, revealing aspects of characters, of circumstances and inclinations that pierce like a wound, while evoking expressions of love, justice and hope.

Described as where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet, these short stories by Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero are not my usual fare, however I chose to read it for #WITMonth and discover what the boundaries of Gothic really means.

There are six stories and the first few were tales of macabre revenge that reminded me of Yoko Ogawa’s excellent collection Revenge.

Overall an interesting, dark collection that brings out a quiet consideration in each of the protagonists as they grapple with their challenging situations and must either make a decision or give in to one made by an other.

blessed are the meek

A young woman is violated. Everyone around her seems to be denying the gravity of it. The family moves away, until the opportunity arrives to bury their grief, literally…

It shouldn’t have been her family that had to leave. But they were the ones who left.

fish, turtle, vulture

A man survives 100 days at sea, the young apprentice companion with him does not.

Now he is meeting the mother of that young boy. She feeds him tortillas, asking him to repeat again what happened out there.

Atoning for his loss, he will atone for hers.

Tell me more, she says, pushing the plate of tortillas towards him as if she were paying him to tell the tale with that warm, fragrant dough.

it looks human when it rains

A Japanese widow in Bolivia teaches origami to women prisoners in a jail. She is curious about these so-called murderers, until she teaches them how to make a snake – and observes in the eyes of one woman, something terrifying.

She was surprised to find that she was not appalled by their crimes, their mistakes, their unbridled passions, the gross misjudgements that had led them there. Who was she to ponder their failings.

Her own past comes back to haunt her, a young woman lodger helps her in the garden, things that were buried resurface in her mind, in her life. A sense of injustice, a prickle of rage. The year of the snake had been the worst, the part she had tried to bury. Origami was a path, a light, because it never resorted to twists or curves to fix a form.

No one who had been so fortunate as to find themselves among the group of émigrés that embarked on the voyage to Brazil and Peru in 1957 before settling in Bolivia, in the eastern rainforest of Yapacani, had returned to Japan carrying the wilting flowers of the fiasco on their backs.

Socorro

“Those boy’s aren’t your husbands” says a deranged Aunt in the opening lines.

I didn’t know in that moment, what shook me more: the mad woman’s barbed remark or the cackle she unleashed as she spoke those words, which felt like a reprimand.

A woman, her husband and twin boys visit her mother and Aunt. She is an expert in mental health but being around her Aunt unsettles her in ways that her professional self finds hard to deal with. The moments of lucidity among the madness, reach in to her own hidden aspect and threaten to overwhelm her.

Donkey Skin

Two children orphaned overnight are sent to live with their French Aunt in Winnipeg, Canada. When they get to 17 years old, they plan an escape, and their world gets turned upside down again.

The only blood uncle we had left in Santa Cruz, Papa’s brother, said that children were always better off being raised near a female voice, and so without saying a word, he signed all the migration papers needed for Dani and me to leave Bolivia and his life for good. Being Bolivian is a mental illness, he told us in that good-humoured way of his, which made us forgive him for everything, even for handing us over like pets to Aunt Anita, who, when the time came to appear at the juvenile court, despite all those breath mints she slotted between her teeth, still couldn’t disguise the stench of whiskey.

Kindred Deer

Intelligent but struggling financially, students sign up for medical trials that promise to cover their debts, but at what price.

The medicinal smell that rises from Joaquin’s body like an aura has taken over our bedroom. It’ll be gone in a few days, they told him.

They ignore the corpse of a dead animal outside their window, leaving it longer than they should to address. Like the strange mark on his back that shouldn’t be there, have they left that too late as well, will he pay the ultimate price?

Pay him double or I’m leaving, I say.

Author, Giovanna Rivero

Giovanna Rivero was born in the city of Montero, Santa Cruz, Bolivia in 1972 and is a writer of short stories and novels.

She holds a doctorate in Hispano-American literature. In 2004, she studied on the Iowa Writing Program and in 2006 was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, enabling her to take a masters in Latin American literature at the University of Florida. In 2014, she received her doctorate. In 2011, she was selected by the Guadalajara Book Fair as one of the 25 upcoming stars of Latin American literature.

She is the author of the books of short stories as well as children’s books. She has published four novels: Las camaleonas (2001), Tukzon (2008), Helena 2022 (2011) and 98 segundos sin sombra (2014). Her literary work, which moves between horror literature and science fiction, is regarded as a major contribution to the renewal of the Gothic and fantastic genres in Latin America.

March 30, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Dublin Literary Award Shortlist 2024

Back in January, the Dublin Literary Award 2024 announced a longlist of 70 books nominated by 80 libraries including librarians and readers, from 35 countries around the world.

Six novels have now been shortlisted for the award, featuring authors who are American, Canadian, Australian, Romanian and Irish, nominated by public libraries in Romania, Germany, Jamaica, Canada and Australia.

The only one I have read, and it was a 5 star read for me is Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time (see my review here) I include the judges’ comments below to help you decide if you are interested in reading any of the nominated titles.

Solenoid sounds interesting and has been highly praised, but 840 pages is too grand of an ask for this reader. Praiseworthy is tempting, but again 740 pages!

The Shortlist of Six Novels

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (literary fiction)

– Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home in Dalkey, overlooking the sea. His peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask about a traumatic, decades-old case. A case that Tom never came to terms with. His peace is further disturbed by a young mother who asks for his help. And what of Tom’s wife, June, and their two children? A beautiful, haunting novel about what we live through, what we live with, and what will survive of us.

Judges’ Comments

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry is a book about love. It’s a world of precarious balancing, a high wire act in which the ghosts of the past intermingle with the challenges of the present. Here a retired policeman settling into a new stage in his life faces the legacy of an old case. This exploration of trauma, childhood abuse in catholic institutions, memory and the lingering impact of loss is devastating. It deftly avoids the trap of solely being one note in that regard. Barry does something clever here where he elevates the work beyond the confines of its themes into a reading experience that often feels transcendent despite the painful subject matter. It’s impossible to read this novel and not be moved by its mercurial power, the ways in which it shifts ideas of human consciousness. This is a beautiful and, in some ways, tender work. Full of heart, risk and that illusive, rare quality the best storytellers possess, it marks Barry, one of our most gifted talents as a writer who continues to invigorate the novel form.

‘Outstanding, a revelatory and deeply affecting work. Barry’s meditation on trauma, memory and loss is a book about love that lingers in the body long after reading it.’ — Irenosen Okojie, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter (Romania)

– Based on Cărtărescu’s own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist’s life and spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics.

On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. Grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life.

Combining fiction, autobiography and history, Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art within the Communist present.

Judges’ Comments

We can imagine (it not fully grasp) a world that has, in comparison to our own, an extra dimension.” In some respects, this is the world of Solenoid. The city of Bucharest in which the narrator is a teacher and failed writer is a place in which what appears to be an abandoned factory contains unexpected caverns, tunnels and a gallery of enormous parasites, where an apparently ordinary, run-down house is built upon an electrical device that causes people lying in bed to float. By turns wildly inventive, philosophical, and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little known to English-language readers. Sean Cotter’s translation of the novel sets out to change that situation, capturing the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cărtărescu’s work to an entirely new readership.

‘An anti-novel that for all intents and purposes should not exist but still does despite itself, thanks to the overpowering talents of the author and the translator.’ — Anton Hur, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Haven by Emma Donoghue (Ireland) (historical fiction)

– In 7th-century Ireland, a scholar/priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks – young Trian & old Cormac – he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. With only faith to guide them and drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find a steep, bare island, inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean? What they find is the extraordinary island now known as Skellig Michael.

Judges’ Comments

A novel of stylistic precision yet ethical complexity, Haven tells the story of three monks in seventh-century Ireland in search of a place of retreat from worldly temptation. Their journey by boat to a barren islet allows the com- plex interaction between experience and idealism to be revealed and subtly explores the importance of evolving human bonds in shaping community. Haven’s searching treatment of authority, and the tensions between rigid beliefs and openness of thought, extend beyond interpersonal dynamics to our relationship with the natural environment. The world Emma Donoghue creates in this novel is at once strange and familiar, provoking us to think deeply about the importance of human empathy in navigating our place on this earth.

‘A novel of stylistic precision yet ethical com- plexity, Haven offers a searching treatment of authority, examining the implications of fixed beliefs for our relationships with each other and with the more-than-human world.’ — Lucy Collins, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (USA/Jamaica) (Short Stories)

– In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated by what their younger son calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and sly commentary, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and white supremacy.

Judges’ Comments

Jonathan Escoffery’s energetic novel-in-stories, If I Survive You, follows a Jamaican family living hand-to-mouth in Florida. The different members of the family search for a foothold in this new and exhausting country, each in their own way, struggling against poverty, racism, recession and hurricanes. At the heart of the story lies a deep-rooted racial ambiguity; where does one belong and is it possible to be “a little of this and a little of that” and still find your way, find your people, find a future? The story also deals with the universal condition of fatherly rejection and sibling rivalry, with a remarkable eye for perfect de- tails. The narrative is vibrant, humorous, snappy and quietly devastating; eight interlinking stories told by various voices, often from an urgent and empathetic second-person point of view, and also in Jamaican dialect, that describe how life keeps knocking the family back in their pursuit of identity and happiness.

‘A fresh voice in fiction, Jonathan Escoffery blurs the lines between the short story and the novel in a work that brings us into the lives of Jamaican-Americans in Miami. Through linked stories, the form mirrors the lives of the characters and their struggles to connect, both with their families, and with the society around them.’ — Chris Morash, 2024 Dublin Literary Non-Voting Chair

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (Canada) (Historical Fiction)

– It’s 1929, and Baxter is considered lucky, as a Black man, to have a job as a porter on a train that crisscrosses the continent. He has to smile and nod for the white passengers when they call him ‘George.’ He’s obsessed with teeth, and saving up tips for dentistry school.

On this trip, the passengers are unruly, especially when the train is stranded for days – their secrets leak out, blurring with Baxter’s sleep-deprivation hallucinations. When he finds an illicit postcard of two men, Baxter’s longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with it or his memories of a certain Porter Instructor.

Judges’ Comments

An unconventional historical novel that combines meticulous research and deep imagination, The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr takes readers on a vividly depicted train ride in the 1920’s from the perspective of a Black and queer sleeping car porter as he tries to make a life that is a little less precarious and a lot more hopeful despite the odds stacked against him. As the train travels through the rural Canadian landscape, Baxter, the porter of the title, similarly traverses the vistas of memory, the reality that surrounds him, and his hopes and visions of the future on his own interior journey of discovery and self-creation. Written in a concise yet evocative style, this slim novel combines the epic scope of history with the lift and verve of ghost stories and queer narrative, creating a quietly propulsive read that at the same time takes stock of an entire life in the space of a single train voyage.

“He drinks melting glacier, plunges his hands into the water past the point of ice just to wake himself up and calm himself down. He ascends into the vestibule, his legs shaky, his hands icy numb.”

‘You can almost taste the exhaustion and despair in this quiet, yet vivid, story of a black man working as a porter on a sleeper train in Canada in 1929. Beautifully written, melancholy but never without hope.’— Ingunn Snaedel, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Australia) (Literary fiction)

– In a small town in northern Australia dominated by a haze cloud, a crazed visionary sees donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in the dance of moths and butterflies. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful.

Praiseworthy is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

Judges’ Comments

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory about a pernicious haze that settles over a northern Australia town yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65,000 years of aboriginal survival. Intimate while epic, the family drama at its center reads like chamber music on a symphonic scale. Wright has authored a blisteringly funny book, replete with situations and speech that elicit wild laughter – a laughter through tears we may recognize from our readings of Beckett and Kafka. She has also written a beautiful one: time and again Praiseworthy delivers unforgettable images, from ‘aerial rivers’ of dancing butterflies to hordes of stinking donkeys. Startlingly original, fiercely political, uncompromising in every respect, Praiseworthy expands the possibility of the novel form.

‘Funny and fierce, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a wonder of twenty-first century fiction. This modernist more-than-an-allegory yokes a painfully contemporary tale of political, social and climatic disaster to a narrative consciousness embodying 65 000+ years of aboriginal survival.’ — Daniel Medin, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

Reading From Libraries

The novels nominated and shortlisted for the Award will be available for readers to borrow from Dublin City Libraries and from public libraries around Ireland, or can be borrowed as eBooks and some as eAudiobooks on the free Borrowbox app, available to all public library users.

Have you read any of the shortlist? Are you tempted by any of these titles? Let me know in the comments below.

February 5, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlist 2024

The NZ Book Awards longlist comes out so early in the year, I am often late catching up with it. There are longlists for fiction, poetry, general nonfiction and illustrated nonfiction, a total of 44 titles. The complete list can be viewed here.

2023 was a great reading year for New Zealand fiction, and author Catherine Chidgey who won last year’s fiction award for her novel The Axeman’s Carnival, is again nominated this year for her latest Pet. Both her novels were longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2024, a unique position to be in. This year’s longlist features eight novels and two short story collections.

From the list below, I have read three novels, though only reviewed Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. I enjoyed both Lioness and Pet, and may reread them to review later, as I read them during the summer months, when books tend to be devoured and not thought too deeply about.

It’s good to see two short story collections nominated that address topical themes and the intergalactic indie hit about alienation that entertains and makes its readers consider what that feels like.

The links in the titles will take you to the Goodreads descriptions of the novels. I have created or copied short blurbs to give you an idea of what they’re each about.

The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction longlist

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley [WWII visceral novel] – a novel about brothers at war, empathy and the aftermath. Aged 19 in 1939, Roy and his twin brother Tony enlist in the NZ Infantry Brigade. They fight in Crete where Tony dies. Burdened by the loss of his brother, Roy continues to Africa and Europe.

Audition by Pip Adam [Science Fiction/Dystopia] – a novel, part science fiction, part social realism that asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

Backwaters by Emma Ling Sidnam [family history/belonging] – debut novel by award-winning New Zealand poet about a 4th generation New Zealander struggling with a sense of identity and belonging.

Laura is tired of being asked where she’s really from. Her family has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for four generations, and she’s ambivalent at best about her Chinese heritage. But when she’s asked to write about the Chinese New Zealander experience for a work project, Laura finds herself drawn to the diary of her great-great-grandfather Ken, a market gardener in the early years of the British colony.

Bird Life by Anna Smaill [literary fiction/magical realism] – A lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently. Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.

In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives. Two women deal with individual traumas, form an unlikely friendship, helping each other see a different possible world.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton [Eco Mystery/Thriller(y)] – an eco-thriller of sorts that considers intentions, actions, and consequences, an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival. Featuring green activists, politician farmer and his wife, a tech billionaire and the lone wolf investigative journalist with a past.

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Literary Fiction/Blended Family, Second Wife Drama) – a novel of a woman’s self doubt and shifting place in second families and relationships.

Trevor and Therese are a power couple living in the capital city, he is a developer and she runs a chain of fashion boutiques. That’s the exterior. At home, there is his adult family (issues) to contend with and her uncertain place in a scenario that is rapidly shifting when his deals come under scrutiny and his children make increasing demands. Increasingly, she finds refuge elsewhere, inviting another kind of risk into her precarious existence.

Pet by Catherine Chidgey [Coming of Age/School Drama/Literary Fiction] – Set in New Zealand in 1984 and 2014, traversing themes of misplaced trust, bullying, racism and misogyny, a chilling novel that explores the consequences of age old complacency and silence.

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher, and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Ruin and Other Stories by Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu) [Short Stories on Being A Woman/Friendship/Relationships/Power] – Moving between contemporary New Zealand and London, a debut short story collection that explores power and its contortions, powerlessness and its depravities, and the ends to which we will go to claim back agency.

Women and girls walk a perilously thin line between ruin and redemption in these stories as they try—with varying degrees of success—to outmanouver the violence that threatens to define their lives.

There’s the physical violence of men against their bodies—and sometimes the violence they exact in revenge. While doubts about a romantic partner, an abandonment by a sister, the fallout of a parent’s porgnography addiction, the betrayal of a friend, even the desire to touch a stranger’s fur-like body are subtler aggressions that pack their own kinds of punches.

Signs of Life by Amy Head [short stories/earthquake/post recovery] – A ‘lest we forget’ collection.

Christchurch, post earthquakes, the earth is still settling. Containers line the damaged streets, inhabitants waver – like their city – suspended between disaster and recovery. Tony, very much alive, is declared dead, Gerald misreads one too many situations in his community patrol, and boomer Carla tries online dating. At the epicentre of these taut, magnetic stories is 20-something Flick who, just as she is finding her feet, faces a violent disruption – this time in human form – while her mostly-ex gets set to marry. Keenly observed, deftly humorous, Signs of Life turns on the smallest of details to show how we carry on.

Turncoat by Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) (Science Fiction/Literary Political Satire/Indie smash-hit!) – a futuristic novel about an idealistic human, that explores the effect of being colonised and serves as a commentary on the experiences of Māori public servants while inviting Pākehā to imagine that experience.

Daniel is a young, idealistic Human determined to make a difference for his people. He lives in a distant future in which Earth has been colonised by aliens. His mission: infiltrate the Alien government called the Hierarch and push for it to honour the infamous Covenant of Wellington, the founding agreement between the Hierarch and Humans.

With compassion and insight, Turncoat explores the trauma of Māori public servants and the deeply conflicted role they are expected to fill within the machinery of government. From casual racism to co-governance, Treaty settlements to tino rangatiratanga, Turncoat is a timely critique of the Aotearoa zeitgeist, holding a mirror up to Pākehā New Zealanders and asking: “What if it happened to you?”

Shortlist Annoucement

The 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlist will be announced on 6 March, 2024.

The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction will be judged by reading advocate and former bookseller Juliet Blyth (convenor); writer, reviewer and literary festival curator Kiran Dass; and fiction writer Anthony Lapwood (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Pākehā). They will be joined in deciding the ultimate winner from their shortlist of four by an international judge.

The winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction will receive $65,000.

A Year of Reading New Zealand Literature

In 2024, Lisa at ANZLitLovers and Theresa at TheresaSmithWrites will celebrate the rich literary heritage of Antipodean writing by joining forces to spend a year discovering New Zealand fiction.

Reading from their TBR and whatever else comes their way, they’ll be posting reviews on their blogs and sharing via social media using the hashtag #AYearofNZLit

Follow them or join in if you’re interested in reading Kiwi fiction!

November 19, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (2021) by Heba Hayek

Tender, nostalgic vignettes of a childhood growing up in Gaza, often told from the perspective of the twenty-something narrator looking back from the present, now living in exile in London. She is constantly longing for old places while finding new ones, the past never far from being elicited by the present.

Each new chapter has an associated song, vignettes accompanied by a playlist.

The image of the sambac, the tree that filled our back yard with its sweet, creamy scent, appears in my narrator’s attempts to create life where this shrub doesn’t naturally thrive.

short stories Palestinian Literature Gaza Hajar Press

The little stories are so compelling, I finished them in one sitting and was left wanting to read more. I sincerely hope the author is writing more stories, preserving important memories, while there is a terrible war raging in her home town.

These stories are the anti-thesis of that violent incursion, they speak of family outings to the sea, of friendships, of Aunties, though so many are tinged with reminders that it is almost never without some reference to loss.

As the narrator grows into unlikely circumstances away from Gaza, memory is her greenhouse; her way to bring back the voice of the girl who was sacrificed and born in the hands of her identity. At her desk in a flat in Southeast London, she writes of what makes her soul flicker: community love, especially the kind embodied by circles of women and girls.

Guns and Figs

In this vignette, our narrator shares a childhood memory of driving along the Gaza coast with her parents, beside the Mediterranean, in her favourite place, by the window facing the sea, window down, sea breeze rushing in, an unchanging view for the duration of the 20 minute drive.

The song accompanying the vignette is Fairuz ”Nassam Alayna El Hawa’ (The Breeze Is Upon Us)

Photo by Kadir Akman on Pexels.com

My brother and I each had assigned places in the car, until our little sister grew old enough to claim her window-seat rights. Then the rotation became tricky, involving fights that mostly ended with my brother crying in the middle.

I usually sat by the window, facing the sun and the sea, breathing the salty, creamy air and occasionally eating grapes and figs: the ultimate Mediterranean snack.

These drives all felt the same, until the last one.

At a checkpoint, a soldier indicates they should pull over, “I’ll just be a minute” says her father. An hour later he returns, the Friday barbecue trips end indefinitely that day, though she is never told why.

I started to notice Baba paying more attention to the road; it seemed like he was avoiding certain checkpoints. Every so often, he would point out something ahead and wonder aloud whether it was a checkpoint or a fruit cart. As Fairuz sang from the cassette player, Baba drove on, trying to guess the difference between guns and figs.

Friendship, Fear and Foreign Places

Other stories ‘Ask Me Anything’ tell of school days interrupted by explosions, of friendships interrupted by disappearances, ‘A Carry-On Full Of Pictures and Letters’.

We were never trained for emergencies at school. We just knew what to do. We would sit on the floor under our tables each time we heard the recurrent loud explosions – ignore the first two, exchange a few nervous looks, and then, in one swift move, we’d all be in our places by the third. That consistency was comforting. The fact that we had survived the first two was a good enough sign that it’d be worth shielding ourselves from the rest.

In an attempt at reassurance, our teacher would remind the class: ‘The one you hear isn’t the one that kills you.’

One day her best friend Lubna leaves Gaza without telling anyone. She had visited the Al-Shifaa hospital after breaking her arm and never returned.

When she was ten, Lubna’s dad had been one of seven people martyred after the occupation forces targeted a car in the middle of a busy street. She’d been planning her exit for years; I just didn’t think it was really going to happen.

Three years later, she visits her friend in Amsterdam where she now lives.

Song: Lucy Dacus – ‘Yours and Mine’.

That day feels like the oldest memory I have. Yet somehow I can barely remember it at all, or the person I was when I hadn’t yet imagined what it meant to leave.

‘I love my mother, but she couldn’t protect me. I love you, but you couldn’t either. I’m a lot better now, you see?’ She waves her hand in the air, and I look around and nod.

A Moving Tale, Of Family Drama

Song: Nina Simone – ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’

In this vignette, we first hear that our narrator has been kicked out of her flat after secretly hosting an Airbnb guest to help pay the rent. Homeless, she moves into the office where she works and takes on additional responsibilities.

Sometimes, I even feel content in my windowless bunker, stealing bits of people’s lunches from the common lounge – not the entire meal. As I look up flats in my small college town, I think of my first big move.

Here, we learn of when our narrators parents leave the family home, the summer she turns six, after problems around inheritance became intolerable. Their last day living in an apartment above her grandmother Sitti, arrives:

Moving out of the family house was never a casual affair, but rather a statement. It’s like leaving home for the first time – making a point that it’s time to move on. Changes like these usually carried an undertone of wives taking their husbands away from their families and keeping them for themselves.

The move also meant that no one was going to interfere in how to raise us, except for my parents. It was a bit of a slap in the face, especially for Sitti. But I was excited about it; I wanted to be like my other cousins who visited only on Fridays and wore something new each time: a little bag or a hair tie, or even a completely different hairstyle. I was ready to rebel with my parents and become the daughter of a mean woman. I started to imagine what I would wear the next Friday.

Some years later, she visits her grandmother in Belgium, where she now lives and finds her safe, but malcontent.

Song: Idir – ‘A Vava Inouva’

Seventy years since her birth,our Grandma is in a French-speaking town, barely able to move, again a refugee. She tells me she didn’t want to leave Gaza, and that she regrets it.

‘Who leaves at this age?’ she says, slightly ashamed of her attempt at survival. As though there were an age limit to craving life, or to that quiet longing older folks back home often fear expressing.

It is a wonderful collection, that preserves childhood memories and shares with the rest of us, a slice of life for a member of a Palestinian family in Gaza, where growing up is fraught with uncertainty, trauma and nothing can be taken for granted.

From afar, the beauty of family and fragmented moments of friendship gain additional significance, as a way of life is slowly and methodically destroyed.

A must read, excellent portrayal of a lonesome yearning for home.

To order a copy of this book, visit Hajar Press here.

Heba Hayek, Author

Heba (she/they) is a London-based, Gaza-raised Palestinian author, creative and facilitator. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Miami University, Ohio, and studied for an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

Rooted in anti-nation-state, decolonial, queer, Afrikan feminist thought, Heba’s work navigates topics such as disposability, Global South solidarity movements, land justice, Palestinian drill music, and more.

Heba’s first book, Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, won the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards and was chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye and The New Arab.

April 15, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Dance Move by Wendy Erskine

Dance Move is Belfast author Wendy Erskine’s second volume of short stories and the first one I have read. Her debut Sweet Home was reviewed to critical acclaim, so I was looking forward to reading this collection published in 2022 and appropriately I chose to read it in-flight, on my way to Belfast for a weekend visit.

I also was reading it for Reading Ireland Month 2023, but did not have time to review it before that ended.

In-flight versus On-Train Entertainment

Dance Move Wendy Erskine It was the perfect choice for in-flight reading, as the stories were thoroughly entertaining and kept me gripped in between flight delays, air traffic control strikes, and would have kept me company on the Elizabeth Line had I not been engrossed in eavesdropping on a conversation between two captivating young men where they discussed how they create fashion insta stories, the merits of studying in Portugal versus London; a recent concert one of them performed in Cuba last week (as you do) and gossiping about their friend who found love after challenging himself to go on 100 tinder dates – not the kind of conversation one might overhear where I live, thus book aside and ears wide open!

And so to some of the stories that have stayed with me:

Mathematics

In the first story, the opening line reads:

“The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun”

It is a wonderful encapsulation of all that is to come, referring to a collection of things that have been left behind in the various short-let rentals our protagonist has cleaned. She works in a hotel that has a policy of holding lost property for 2 months before the staff can claim them, but her other boss goes by the saying ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’. Unless it is a weapon, then it should be given to him.

“Mr Dalzell had said that anything she found was hers, automatically.”

She gets driven around from place to place by another employee with a van, cleaning up after all kinds of people, who we never see or know who they are – but clearly they are not so much the short holiday crowd, more like overnight partying groups. One day she finds something left behind that creates a significant dilemma. Perhaps it was only a matter of time, but from this moment on the story captivates and builds tension as we wonder what choices she will make. Brilliant.

Mrs Dallesandro

Photo on Pexels.com

Mrs Dallesandro opens as she leaves the hairdresser, giving a wave and observing her reflection as she leaves. She has been married twenty-three years, knows what to expect from her predictable life, is well maintained and under no illusion regarding her husband’s various dalliances with much younger women.

Mrs Dallesandro wouldn’t call them affairs or relationships, since that would elevate them to a status they didn’t warrant. She has never once felt threatened by them.

She is on a mission to go to a sunbed clinic, an activity that she perceives as a minor transgression, that ultimately will give her something she does not get elsewhere. She recalls an episode in her youth with a shopkeeper’s son and we wonder if that had an impact on the way she is now, the choices she subsequently made.

It is an evocative story of the shallowness of a life half lived, of the things a person might occupy themselves with when life has hollowed them out, the strange lengths one might go, to find a substitute for human connection. It reminded me a little of Forbidden Notebook by Alba des Céspedes, another woman living a half-life, who discovers an interior version of herself at odds with how she acts, when she begins to keep an intimate journal.

Golem

In this story jealousy and resentments between sisters surface alongside familial expectations and judgments. A birthday party creates the scene for family dysfunction to play itself out, imbued with the symbolism and pointedness of the gift, with the observations of what people wear, how trivial objects trigger emotions, how the laid-back and the intense personalities function side by side in the great mix of extended family. How human connection blossoms in surprising ways despite the circumstances.

His Daughter

A story of family loss, of grief, of obsession and activity. Just as the family are sitting down to dinner, Curtis pops outside for a minute. He does not come back. Ever. Posters go up all over town, they keep the mother busy. Time passes and signs appear of life changing, reforming, resisting, resenting, of repeat patterns that overtake the old reality. A provocative profound observation of life and death.

Dance Move

In the titular story, a mother takes a pole dancing lesson and at home tries to push her daughter to enrol in ballet. She watches her daughter and friends have fun dirty dancing with a critical eye and is quick to apportion blame.

We learn of an event from her past relating to her brother, an accident, her parents. The reader takes in the present and the past and will make their own connections between them, forced to use their own imagination to ponder any cause and effect on relationships.

Family Dynamics, Human Connection, Cause and Effect in How Lives are Lived

Coastal pathway, County Down, Northern Ireland

It’s not easy to make any overall assumptions or impressions about the collection, as each story took me to a different place through their characters and circumstance, that pulled me in quickly and left me pondering one thing or other.

Perhaps as I describe above, it is that setting up of a dynamic, a situation and the observation of how people react or respond, the reader being given a little or no insight into a person’s past that makes us wonder why people decide to act the way they do.

The China Factory by Mary Costello

It’s week three of Reading Ireland Month and today I’m sharing thoughts on a book of short stories by Irish author Mary Costello, The China Factory.

Threads of Inspiration

Irish Literature Reading Ireland Month I’ve heard many say good things about her debut novel Academy Street and when her most recent novel The River Capture was published, a self-confessed homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses, I decided I would start at the beginning with Costello’s short stories.

I will read The River Capture later, as April is the One Dublin, One Book initiative and their chosen read for 2022 is Nora by Nuala O’Connor another book with a James Joyce connection. It is a bold reimagining of the life of James Joyce’s wife and muse, Nora, the model for his character Molly Bloom in Ulysses.

The Dublin City Libraries initiative encourages people to read a book connected with the capital city during the month of April every year.

Capturing a Voice

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The 12 stories that make up The China Factory create a strong sense of authorial voice. Highly observant, sensitive characters, steeped in melancholy. They are practiced at holding back, trying not to make a ripple in the external world, until unforseen events pitch them into interactions, all the while controlling that emotional seepage.

In the opening story, The China Factory, a young woman works a summer job in a china factory, catching a ride with a quiet man named Gus, who she is distantly related to. She works at the sponger’s station, wiping off lines the moulds leave on clay cups.

I smiled when I passed the other girls those first days, and longed to speak, but feared that words would betray the yearning for friendship that I felt inside.

For a while she becomes closer to the girls, listening to their gossip, they quiz her about Gus, the freak, sharing an overheard story of his childhood that disturbs her. When a wayward man appears with a gun, Gus will surprise them all, and years later the impact of that summer job, his actions and her guilt will continue to haunt her.

dreamy woman with crossed legs sitting near window

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In Things I See a woman lies in bed, hyper aware of her husbands movements downstairs, she relays scenes in her mind of being close to him, but even in her imagination she holds back. She fears not growing old, but of growing different.

There is something severe and imperious in Don’s bearing that makes me resist.

She works full time and her husband cares for their six year old child. Her sister Lucy who is visiting, seems more at ease in the family than she does. The things she sees, hears, picks up on, imagines, occupy her mind, creating a distance, a corner from which she has entrapped herself. A witness. Stifled. Knowing she will not change anything, though her indecision will imprint itself on her face and in her demeanour.

And I think this is how things are, and this is how they will remain, and with every new night and every new wind I know that am cornered too, and I will remain, because I can not unlove him.

Drudgery, Dignity and Denial

The stories examine aspects of everyday life and highlight the hidden selves, the thoughts beneath the actions, the things that people hide from each other, from themselves, the cover stories and meaningless conversations that patch over the cracks that might reveal the reality.

In The Patio Man, a gardener knows nothing about his employer, a young frail woman observes him from the window, she struggles to articulate what she requires from him, until the moment she must ask him to drive her to the hospital. Still nothing is ever said, just small talk that takes the mind elsewhere, far from the catastrophic event occurring in the present.

The collection opens with an epigram from Rilke’s poem Autumn:

And night by night, down into solitude,

the heavy earth falls far from every star.

We are all falling. This hand’s falling too –

all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

which sets the tone and theme of falling – into and out of love, of relationships, to one’s death, in and out of the kaleidoscope of emotions, whether expressed or suppressed, no one is immune to the falling-sickness.

While the stories capture that voice particular to the author, that melancholy can wear on the reader, repeated time and again as it does, manifesting in the many losses and unfortunate events each story portrays, the quiet outer acceptance of discordant inner turmoil.

That said, I am looking forward to engaging with a longer story, hoping for the chance of redemption a novel might bring.

Mary Costello, Author

Mary Costello is an Irish short story writer and novelist from Galway now living in Dublin.

Her collection of short stories, The China Factory ( 2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.

Her second book and first novel, Academy Street, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize and the EU Prize for Literature in 2014. The novel went on to win the Irish Novel of the Year Award as well as the Irish Book of the Year. Her second novel The River Capture was published in 2019.

December 10, 2021 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Postcard Stories by Jan Carson

Epistolary Treasures

Jan Carson Author Northern Ireland Fiction I just love the concept of these works of flash fiction, postcard size stories, that have a geographic connection to a street or location in Northern Ireland, that originated as a story written on the back of a postcard – an alternative restriction to the usual one when writing flash fiction, of keeping it to 100 -150 words – and that the postcard was both sent and retained, a gift and an accumulated collection.

This not quite Ireland proper/ is not the Mainland/ is certainly not Europe in the Continental sense.

When I first picked it up, a little while ago now, I looked at the contents and went to read a few entries from the locations that were familiar to me, Belfast International Airport, Newtownards Road, Holywood Road, Linenhall Street, Holywood, Ormeau Road, but of course that was me thinking of my own story, so it didn’t make much sense. I was looking for something that wasn’t there.

Removing Expectations

So now I read it again, this time from the beginning and just allow it to tell me its own story, its bite sized exercise in writing, the awakening of imagination, the sharing of the craft, its way of thinking of others while being in the act of creation.

The book is thoughtfully illustrated by Benjamin Phillips. You can view the images from the book via the link provided through his name. They are truly evocative.

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I read, am entertained and wonder what it must have been like to receive one of these. Is there a connection between the story and the recipient, is it random, did they reply, did they understand the motivation of the author, did it matter? How did you get to be one of the recipients? Does she really have that many friends whose addresses she knows, a database perhaps, or is the postcard sending a fiction in itself?

Here she is practicing using the second person narrative voice from Week 6, February 5th, 2015, Cathedral Quarter, Belfast from a postcard sent to Claire Buswell.

When you were seven years old you threw a dart at a black-haired girl, running away in the garden. The dart lodged and stuck just below her shoulder blade. She fell forward in the grass. The flight on the dart was red and black and white. These were also the colours of the duvet cover in your parents’ bedroom. This was the 80’s. Afterwards the dart came away clean as needles. No harm done. You did not tell and neither did she.

I’ve read Jan Carson’s novel The Fire Starters, I know she is a fan of absurdist fiction. I also know that she works in the community arts sector and has taught creative writing skills to people to help build empathy, using storytelling to show how we can imagine being in the shoes of another. I remember being reassured by this knowledge, because the protagonist in her novel completely lacks empathy, and that is a frightening thing.

Cafés and Markets, Happiness or Disappointment

Susan Picken receives Week 45’s November story from Victoria Square, Belfast:

‘If your drink doesn’t make you happy, we’ll make you another,’ I read aloud, pointing to the sign above the barista’s head. It’s been there, right behind him, with the toastie machine and the coffee syrups, for so long now that he’s forgotten all about it.

melancholy free coffee happy unhappy It turns out there are only so many free coffees a person can drink before realising a hot beverage cannot cure loneliness, grief or melancholy.

The collection ends in Week 52 at St George’s Market on a sorrowful note, that makes me think I ought to take my own aromatherapy potions to the Christmas market, offering an antidote to the melancholy nature of some of this population.

Every year during the month leading up to Christmas, Eleanor takes a stall at St George’s Market and sells disappointment in small, hand-made bottles…She stocks any number of different disappointments: the disappointment of an unsupportive parent, the disappointment of a homely child, the disappointment of being alone or not nearly alone enough, the disappointment of cats, good wine, box sets and religion, the dry disappointment of Christmas Day evening which is easily the most popular product on her stall.

I have Postcard Stories 2, so I will be hoping that perhaps, as we wander more streets in the year that followed Postcard Stories, there might be reason for more optimism and perhaps we might learn how to get on the postcard list.

Jan Carson, Author

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. Her debut novel Malcom Orange Disappears (2014) was published to critical acclaim, followed by a short-story collection, Children’s Children (2016), and two flash fiction anthologies Postcard Stories (2017) and Postcard Stories 2 (2020).

Her second novel The Fire Starters (2019) translated into French by Dominique Goy-Blanquet as Les Lanceurs de Feu, won the EU Prize for Literature, was shortlisted for two prestigious French literary awards the Prix Femina and Prix Médicis in 2021 and was also shortlisted for the Dalkey Novel of the Year Award.

The most recent book The Last Resort, a collection of ten linked short stories set in a fictional caravan park, was published in April 2021.

Her work has appeared in numerous journals and on BBC Radio 3 & 4. She runs arts projects and events with older people especially those living with dementia.

January 4, 2021 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat (2019)

Everything Inside is a collection of short stories by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat.

Little Haiti in Miami, Florida

Edwidge Danticat Literary Fiction Short Stories Having left Haiti when she was twelve years to live in America, it’s not surprising that her stories involve a cast of characters with connections to her home country and a neighbourhood in Miami Dade County, Florida referred to as ‘Little Haiti’ after a Haitian pro-democracy activist wrote to a Miami newspaper referring to his new home as “Little Port-au-Prince” which was shortened and known thereafter as ‘Little Haiti’.

Many Haitians fled their country in the sixties and seventies, to escape the brutal dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

The stories concern those who left, those who stayed, those who visited one place or another for a short time, those who belong, those who are trying to find their place, those who have found success by honest means and those who resorted to taking advantage of the vulnerable.

The Immigrant Dilemma, Stay or Return?

When the dictatorship in Haiti ended, so did a lot of marriages. This tension and divide is also explored within the stories.

There was a hard line between those who wanted to stay in America and others who wanted to go back and rebuild the country.

Exploring the connections that bind people together and the events that force them apart, they could be tales of any number of immigrant individuals or families. The clash of cultures shifts and evolves as immigrants find themselves seen as the other, if they stay too long and get too used to life elsewhere.

Character Driven Narratives

Everything Inside Hope Edwidge Danticat short stories Haiti

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There are eight contemplative, character driven stories that are slightly melancholic, that all represent some change in the status quo, but that each provide the prospect of hope.

This is the third book I’ve read by Edwidge Danticat and I enjoy the way she fuses the characters of her origin country with present day life in America and the intersection of the two.

It maps the slow beginnings of a divide between the generations, grandparents who have never met their grandchildren, business people trying to entice successful Haitians back to their motherland and the increasing disconnect between the two, as their worlds grow further apart. And the vulnerability of women who put their trust in another.

The stories were published over a twelve year period, so pick up on historical events that create turning points in her stories, the earthquake of 2010, the actions of foreign aid workers, and the elevated perception of North America.

Her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) a story of four generations of women was excellent, as was the gripping memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007) which focuses on the relationship between her father and her Uncle Joseph.

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

Désirée Congo, Evelyne Trouillot (Haitian)

Djinns, Fatma Aydemir (Kurdish)

The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk (Poland)

Francis Bacon’s Nanny, Maylis Besserie (France)

Hungry for What, María Bastarós (Spain)

Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante (Italy)

My Secret Life, Krisztina Tóth (Hungary)

Phantom Pain Wings, Kim Hyesoon (South Korea)

Too Great A Sky, Liliana Corobca (Romania)

Translation of the Route, Laura Wittner (Argentina)

Un Amor, Sara Mesa (Spain)

Vanishing Points, Lucija Stupica (Slovenia)

We Do Not Part, Han Kang (South Korea)

Newbies, First Timers and a Classic Translated

The International Booker Shortlist and Winner 2025

Author, Giovanna Rivero

The Shortlist of Six Novels

Judges’ Comments

Judges’ Comments

Judges’ Comments

Judges’ Comments

Judges’ Comments

Judges’ Comments

Reading From Libraries

The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction longlist

Shortlist Annoucement

A Year of Reading New Zealand Literature

Guns and Figs

Friendship, Fear and Foreign Places

A Moving Tale, Of Family Drama

Heba Hayek, Author

In-flight versus On-Train Entertainment

Mathematics

Mrs Dallesandro

Golem

His Daughter

Dance Move

Family Dynamics, Human Connection, Cause and Effect in How Lives are Lived

Further Reading

Threads of Inspiration

Capturing a Voice

Drudgery, Dignity and Denial

Mary Costello, Author

Epistolary Treasures

Removing Expectations

Cafés and Markets, Happiness or Disappointment

Further Reading

Jan Carson, Author

Little Haiti in Miami, Florida

The Immigrant Dilemma, Stay or Return?

Character Driven Narratives

Further Reading