A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the last six months. For poetry, however,…
Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History by Anna Aslanyan
Review by Karen Langley As bookish people, when we think about translation we’re probably thinking about it in literary terms. There’s a rich seam of literature from other languages available…
The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn
Reviewed by Rob Spence Lucy Newlyn is a intriguing literary figure. She had a career as an Oxford don, publishing well-regarded studies of Romantic poets as well as collections of…
Interview with Rosamund Bartlett about Dostoyevsky and “The Russian Soul”
Interview by Karen Langley Karen: Rosamund, thank you for agreeing to an interview with Shiny New Books! You have a distinguished career as a translator, and also as the author of…
Q&A with Samantha Norman
Samantha was interviewed by Harriet H: Hi Samantha – thanks for agreeing to answer some questions. I very much enjoyed Winter Siege, and wondered if you could say something about the…
The Last of the Bowmans and Black Humour by J Paul Henderson
As he stops off at Shiny New Books on his book tour, we asked J Paul Henderson, author of The Last of the Bowmans (reviewed here), to explore where the black humour comes from…
Reading in Translation
By Jean Morris The right words will come to me, because I am now translating from the heart, not from the head.Maureen Freely One of my favourite reviewers remarked a…
The Art of Memoir and Narrative Non-Fiction
By Neil Ansell I am the author of two books of narrative non-fiction. Both are memoir, but are equally likely to find themselves shelved as nature writing or travel writing….
Translator’s Perspective: An ‘Ordinary’ Christmas
By Emily Boyce During the festive season, Versailles sparkled with inevitability While translating Pascal Garnier’s novel The Islanders, set over several days in December in a snowy Versailles and described by…
The other stories in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: A translator’s perspective
By Rosamund Bartlett We are so used to seeing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in terms of the tragic fate of his heroine that it is sometimes easy to forget how much else goes…
On Translating Boel Westin’s Biography of Tove Jansson – by translator Silvester Mazzarella
I am ashamed to admit that I lived in Helsinki (in Swedish Helsingfors), for more than twenty years during Tove Jansson’s lifetime without ever meeting her or learning very much…
On Writing by A.L. Kennedy
Reviewed by Simon Thomas When I first heard that A.L. Kennedy had written a book called On Writing – now out in paperback – I was intrigued and very keen to read…
In Search of Gielgud: A Biographer’s Tale by Jonathan Croall
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Writing a biography is easy, right? You just have to find out lots of facts about the person, and string them together to make them readable….
Combining Fact and Fiction in the Writing of ‘The Dance of Love’ by Angela Young
The Dance of Love is my second novel, so I’m a novice. I’ve written since I was a child but it’s one thing to write in a notebook you keep under…