#IndieSommer, Women in Translation Month and Summer Break 2021

Indie Publisher, Initiative, News, women writers, , , , , ,

Dear readers,
We’re off for a break now!
But before we leave, here are two wee projects you might enjoy.
Hope we can all get some rest – see you all after the break!

#IndieSommer

Nikola Richter, who runs the fabulous indie publisher mikrotext, came up with an idea to support indie publishers during the summer (and Sarah Raich contributed the hashtag):

AvivA Verlag, Berenberg Verlag, Frohmann Verlag, Kein & Aber, MaroVerlag, mikrotext and many others are among the posted summer reads. There are lots of German books among the recommendations (and some translations), so if you’re looking for some (mostly contemporary) German literature, this might be a good start.

  • #IndieSommer on Twitter: link
  • #IndieSommer on Instagram: link

Women in Translation Month

And, of course, it’s also Women in Translation Month again. I think both initiatives can also be combined quite easily and productively!

Women in Translation Month’s goal is to promote “women writers from around the world writing in languages other than English (whether they have been translated into English specifically or not)” – and I’ve found several great recommendations through #WiTmonth over the last years.

This year, Meytal Radzinski and the Women in Translation project also launched a new website: www.womenintranslation.org with information about the initiative and resources about books by women translated to English (by year) including information about the author, translator, publisher, genre, language etc.

The woman in translation I am currently reading is Alice Zeniter’s “The Art of Losing”, or rather it’s German version Die Kunst zu Verlieren, translated by Hainer Kober (Berlin Verlag, 2019 – see, it fits #IndieSommer and #WiTmonth). I stared it in the French original, L’art de perdre (Flammarion, 2017), but found that my brain couldn’t do it right now. It’s one of the books I didn’t pick up because of its cover (but it would be interesting to compare the French, German and English version, for example – so different!), but rather because the protagonist shares her name with my grandma – and I haven’t come across that many books with main character called Naïma… Even though there are lots of differences between the family in the book and mine, there are so many similarities that I need to pause quite a lot and find it hard just to ‘plough through’ it (also, two little kids are not really helping either…)

Next, I will head over to Katy Derbyshire, whose work as a translator and publisher at V&Q Books is always a good source for more women in translation (link to V&Q Books).

Ah, and one last thing: Meytal Radzinski and her team have published a tweet a day about a woman writer since 1 January under the hashtag #DailyWIT, so this has become an impressive list:

Sandra van Lente