I have the pleasure of writing this from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, an event that earns its ‘international’ stripes several times over every year. To be precise, I write from the festival’s Spiegeltent, one of several luscious mirrored marquees that spring up in the city every August. Belgian-made, with a German-English name and a French title – Moulin Rouge, to suit the Parisian cabaret-style decor – it is a fitting place to rest between readings and to reflect, here, on the exciting developments in the German- and English-language book world.
The intercultural is not new in this literature, of course, as is eloquently displayed by
Kate Roy in her fascinating account of the life story of
Emily Ruete, a nineteenth-century ‘Arab princess’. Ruete married a German colonist and migrated from Zanzibar to Hamburg, leaving behind memoirs that have been – and continue to be – reinvented across a range of media.
The idea of exile and returning to one’s roots also takes centre stage in our exclusive translation of an extract from
Sabrina Janesch’s novel Katzenberge. After her novel was reviewed in last autumn’s issue of NBG, Janesch was invited to be writer-in-residence at this year’s
British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School. We are delighted to present the fruits of that exciting week: ample proof that collaborative translation can produce elegant versions. Here, the novel’s German protagonist re-imagines her Polish grandfather’s birth in a passage that shifts seamlessly between the real and the magical.
New birth is there in
F. C. Delius’s novel
Portrait of the mother as a young woman, too, following the ‘mother’ shortly before the birth of her son. This issue would not be complete without a celebration of Delius’s work, as this year he was awarded Germany’s prestigious
Büchner Prize.
Stuart Taberner introduces readers to his remarkable oeuvre, and British author
Blake Morrison shares his thoughts on
Portrait, the first of Delius’s novels to make it into English – but not, we are sure, the last.
Austria’s
Ingeborg Bachmann Prize takes a different form, judging extracts from unpublished novels rather than the finished product. This innovative and often controversial prize provides an ideal forum for debut novelists, and indeed three of the four excellent debuts that open this issue have been awarded shortlist places this year and last. A mark of great literary distinction, but also a baptism of fire for new authors as their texts are scrutinised by critics, authors and audience.
Travellers stepping off the train at Edinburgh’s main station during the festival are greeted by a huge billboard advertising Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, and
Sam Hancock addresses precisely this phenomenon at the beginning of his thrilling journey through the
German-language crime fiction scene. Accompanying Sam’s case for the significant talent and originality amongst German-language crime writers, we review four new novels of the genre that take the reader from
occupied Hamburg in 1947 to
a re-imagined Berlin of 2011 (a Berlin, that is, which is capital of a still-existing German Democratic Republic), from the
snows of Finland to the
Scottish island of Lewis. This special
crime feature is capped by
Dan Toller’s introduction to the absurd and wonderful world of Austrian crime writer
Heinrich Steinfest.
Edinburgh has played host to
Clemens Meyer this week, too, the justly feted young German author whose writing has found its first home in the English language with the brand new publisher
And Other Stories. It is due not least to the commitment and innovation of organisations like these that more and more translated fiction is appearing on British bookshelves, and in the programmes of our literary festivals. This issue celebrates these developments in an interview with
And Other Stories publisher Stefan Tobler.
But our attention is focused not only on the UK, as this issue marks a new collaboration with the German Book Office in New York. Many thanks are due to Riky Stock for this co-operation and for the co-ordination of the first American NBG editorial committee, and also to Brittany Hazelwood for her sterling transatlantic work on this issue. NBG could not happen without the commitment and support of our steering committee and expert editorial committee in London, and I am very grateful, too, to NBG’s Editorial Assistant, Vanessa Norhausen.
The vibrant international atmosphere here in Edinburgh testifies to the renewed energy, range and vitality in both the German- and English-language book worlds. We trust that you will find yet more proof in these pages.
Charlotte Ryland
| 
| 
| 
| 