July 13, 2021 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…
July 9, 2021 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…
May 4, 2021 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…
February 1, 2018 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,…
October 16, 2016 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…
January 22, 2016 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…
April 9, 2015 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…
January 18, 2015 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…
December 1, 2014 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…
October 10, 2014 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…
April 29, 2014 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…
April 24, 2014 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…
April 21, 2014 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…
April 10, 2014 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…
