Best European Fiction 2012
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ANDREJ NIKOLAIDIS was born in 1974 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992, he came to Ulcinj, Montenegro, as a Bosnian refugee, and currently lives there. He has written for Monitor, Vijesti, and the Bosnian magazine Free Bosnia, and is a columnist for zurnal.info and e-novine.com presently. He wrote a scenario for the motion picture “If There Are Dead” (in production), and he has translated works by Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek from English to Montenegrin. His works include Mimesis (2003), Sin (The Son, 2006), and Dolazak (The Coming, 2009).
SANTIAGO PAJARES was born in 1979 in Madrid, Spain. At the age of twenty-three, he wrote his first novel, El paso de la hélice (The Path of the Helix), which was published in 2004. The book was discovered, translated, and brought to publication in Japan by Borges’s Japanese translator. Pajares wrote his second novel, La mitad de uno (The Other Half ), the next year, and his third, El Lienzo (The Canvas), two years later. Santiago Pajares also writes and shoots short films, and has received nearly twenty awards in Spain for his cinematic work.
PEP PUIG was born in 1969 in Terrassa, Spain. An heir to Mediterranean tradition—writing with the perpetual backdrop of a mythical summer and from a state of permanent adolescence—his work moves ambiguously between sentiment and irony. After his first novel, L’home que torna (The Man Who Returns, 2005), he published Les llàgrimes de la senyoreta Marta (Miss Marta’s Tears, 2007) which received a great critical reception, La Vanguardia praising it as “the best novel written in Catalan in many years.”
BERNARD QUIRINY was born in 1978 in Bastogne, Belgium and lives in Burgundy, where he is an academic, specialist in public law, and author of a thesis on the political thought of Cornelius Castoriadis. He has contributed to several publications, including Le Magazine littéraire and Chronic’art. In 2005 he published his first collection of stories, L’angoisse de la première phrase (Fear of the First Line), followed by a second in 2008, Contes carnivores (Flesh-Eating Fictions), with a preface by Enrique Vila-Matas; this collection garnered numerous prizes. His first novel, Les assoiffées (The Thirsty Ones, 2010), is a satire about a group of French intellectuals on an official expedition to a Belgium that fell in the 1970s under a feminist dictatorship.
NOËLLE REVAZ was born in 1968 in the canton of Valais, Switzerland. She is the author of numerous short stories and two novels, Efina (2009) and Rapport aux bêtes (With the Animals, 2002), which is forthcoming in English. This novel, which has been adapted for the stage and the screen, is the story of a frustrated peasant in an invented spoken language. She has also written radio plays, including a monologue, Quand Mamie (2007). Besides her work as a writer, she teaches creative writing at the Swiss Literature Institute at Biel/Bienne, where she lives.
GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK was born in 1949 in Kilfinane, Ireland, and is the author/translator of over 150 books, including 13 volumes of poetry and a volume of haiku, mostly in Irish (Gaelic). A member of Aosdána, he has given readings in Europe, North, South, and Central America, India, Australia, and Japan. He has also taught haiku at the Schule für Dichtung in Vienna. He has brought out Irish-language versions and translations of poems of Francisco X. Alarcón, Seamus Heaney, Rabindranath Tagore, Günter Grass, Zhāng Ye, Michele Ranchetti, Michael Augustin, Peter Huchel, Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, and numerous others. Uttering Her Name (2009) is his debut volume in English.
LEE ROURKE was born in 1972 in Manchester, England. He is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Canal (winner of the Guardian’s “Not The Booker Prize” 2010), the short-story collection Everyday, and a work of nonfiction, A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction. His literary criticism regularly appears in the Guardian, the Independent, TLS, New Statesman, RSB, and 3:AM Magazine. His second novel, Amber, is forthcoming. He lives in London.
JANUSZ RUDNICKI was born in 1956 in Kędzierzyn-Koźle, Poland. In 1983 he moved to Germany for political reasons, studying Slavic and German literature in Hamburg. He currently divides his time between Hamburg and Prague. He is a frequent contributor to Twórczość and Machina. His novels include One Can Live (1992), winner of the St. Piętak award for a debut; My Wehrmacht (2004); Come On Everyone, Let’s Go (2007), which was nominated for the NIKE Award and the European Literary Prize; and The Death of a Czech Dog (2009), which was a finalist for the NIKE and nominated for three other prizes. Collections of his stories have been published in Germany and the Czech Republic.
MICHAEL STAUFFER was born in 1972 in Winterthur, Switzerland, and has won numerous international awards for his varied work. He has published four novels, over twenty radio plays, and six plays. He writes fiction and drama, does performances, recites poetry, and improvises. He teaches literature at the Swiss Literature Institute at Bern, and he lives and works in Switzerland and Europe. His most recent titles include: Ich begrüsse mich ganz herzlich (I Welcome You Heartily, 2011), Kleine Menschen (Little Men, 2010), and Hinduhans (John the Hindu, 2010), which was nominated for the “Best Fiction” category of the German Audio Book Prize.
SERHIY ZHADAN was born in 1974 in the Luhansk Region of eastern Ukraine. He currently lives in Kharkiv and writes poetry, prose, and essays. He is the author of the poetry collections the very, very best poems, psychedelic stories of fighting, and other bullshit (selected poems, 1992–2000), History of Culture at the Turn of This Century (2002), UkSSR (2004), and Lili Marlen (2009), as well as the story collections Big Mac (2003), Anarchy in the UKR (2005), Hymn of the Democratic Youth (2007), and the novels Depeche Mode (2004) and Voroshilovgrad (2010). His work has been translated into twelve languages as well as being featured on Poetry International’s website.
RUI ZINK was born in 1961 in Lisbon, Portugal. He received a PhD at the New University of Lisbon, where he currently teaches postgraduate courses in text publishing. Over the last decades he’s been dealing with the several possibilities of the fictional word and the novel format. He is well known as an agent provocateur in Lisbon’s cultural scene, and is the author of more than twenty books, including A arte suprema (The Supreme Art, 1997), the first Portuguese graphic novel, and Dádiva divina (2005), which was awarded Portugal’s prestigious PEN Club Award. In 2009 he was Endowed Chair and writer in residence at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Translator Biographies
ARTTU AHAVA, unusually for a native speaker of Finnish, translates from Finnish into English, rather than the other way around. Arttu has a degree in English from Helsinki University, and has done postgraduate studies at Oxford University. He is currently working in Helsinki as an English-language journalist and translator.
CHRISTOPHER BURAWA is a poet and translator. His awards include the 2010 Joy Harjo Poetry Award, a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship for Translation, and a 2008 American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Writing Fellowship. He is the Director of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.
GERALD CHAPPLE has a PhD from Harvard University and taught German at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His translations of Günter Kunert, Barbara Frischmuth, David Wagner, Anita Albus, and others have appeared in Fiction, Agni, Grand Street, Osiris, and Antioch Review. He won an Austrian government Translation Award in 1996.
MARGARET JULL COSTA has been a literary translator for over twenty years, translating, among others, Javier Marías, Eça de Queiroz, and José Saramago. Her work has brought her various prizes, the most recent of which was the 2010 Premio Valle-Inclán for Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell.
JOHN K. COX is professor and department head in history at North Dakota State University in Fargo. He earned his doctorate at Indiana University. The History of Serbia (2002), Slovenia: Evolving Loyalties (2005), and translations of novels by Danilo Kiš and Ivan Cankar are among his chief publications. He is currently writing a study of the fiction of Ismail Kadare.
JENNIFER CROFT is a PhD candidate in compa
rative literary studies at Northwestern University, where she is writing her dissertation on duels in twentieth-century Western literature. Her translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Wag’s Revue, Two Lines, Washington Square, and elsewhere. She lives in Buenos Aires.
KATY DERBYSHIRE comes from London and lives in Berlin. She has translated various contemporary German writers including Clemens Meyer’s short-story collection All the Lights (2011), Helene Hegemann, Dorothee Elmiger, and Inka Parei. Katy runs a blog on German writing by the name of Love German Books.
BRIAN DOYLE teaches Hebrew at the K.U.Leuven in Belgium, and has translated a variety of academic and literary works from Dutch/Flemish into English. His recent literary translations include Christiaan Weijts’s The Window Dresser (2010) and Tessa de Loo’s The Book of Doubt (2011). He also translates poetry and literary nonfiction.
JONATHAN DUNNE translates from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish. His translations include work by Tsvetanka Elenkova, Manuel Rivas, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and have been nominated for major literary prizes, including the International IMPAC Award and the Warwick Prize for Writing. Most recently his translation of the Collected Poems of Lois Pereiro was published by Small Stations Press. He is currently working on a bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature, 1981–2011.
WILL FIRTH was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, Germany, where he works as a freelance translator of literature and the humanities. He translates from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croatian.
MICHAELA FREEMAN was born in 1975 in Prague, the Czech Republic. She is a freelance translator, writer, web designer, digital artist, and creativity coach. She focuses on specialty and creative translations from Czech to English. For this, she teams up with her husband, Jim Freeman, a writer, proofreader, and editor. She maintains a website at michaela-freeman.com.
TSISANA GABUNIA graduated from the Tbilisi State University of Foreign Languages in 1962. She teaches English at TSUFL (now Ilya University), and has taught at Georgetown University and Boston University. Her translation work includes radio plays for the Radio of Georgia, a film script, a libretto of a children’s opera, novels by David Dephy and Eva Babel, and articles for the magazine Modi to Georgia.
EDWARD GAUVIN has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, the Centre National du Livre, Ledig House, the Banff Centre, and ALTA. His work includes A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud and publications in Joyland, Conjunctions, Subtropics, World Literature Today, Epiphany, Tin House, The Southern Review, and the Harvard Review. The winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, he is the contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders. He maintains a website at edwardgauvin.com/blog.
SEÁN KINSELLA is from Ireland. He holds an MPhil in literary translation from Trinity College, Dublin, and he has previously translated work by Frode Grytten and Stig Sæterbakken into English. He currently lives in Norway with his wife and two small daughters.
TOMISLAV KUZMANOVIĆ earned his MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, and has translated Zoran Ferić’s The Death of the Little Match Girl, and Igor Stiks’s A Castle in Romagna, co-translated with Russell Valentino. His translations from Croatian have appeared in Granta, The Iowa Review, and New European Poets. He currently teaches literary translation at the University of Zadar.
ANASTASIA LAKHTIKOVA is a native of Ukraine. She is a Lecturer in the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses in literary translation.
DUSTIN LOVETT, a Fulbright recipient, graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in comparative literature and German as well as a Certificate of Translation Studies. His translations have appeared in previous editions of Best European Fiction and on the Guardian’s website. He currently resides in Vienna, Austria.
DONAL MCLAUGHLIN see under Author Biographies.
RHETT MCNEIL has published numerous translations from Portuguese and Spanish, including short fiction by Machado de Assis and Enrique Vila-Matas, and novels by Gonçalo M. Tavares, A. G. Porta, and António Lobo Antunes. Currently, he is translating novels by Juan Filloy and Luis Chitarroni, and completing a PhD in comparative literature at Penn State University, where he teaches courses in language, literature, and film.
CHRISTOPHER MOSELEY teaches at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College, London and translates from Estonian, Latvian, Finnish, and Swedish. He is the author of Colloquial Estonian and coauthor of Colloquial Latvian for Routledge. He has coedited the Routledge Atlas of the World’s Languages, edited their Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages, and completed the third edition of an atlas of endangered languages for UNESCO.
ANDREW OAKLAND is a translator from Czech and German who lives in Brno, Czech Republic. His recent translations include Radka Denemarková’s Money from Hitler (2009) and Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age (2010). He has just finished translating a novel by Martin Reiner.
PAUL OLCHVÁRY has translated twelve books from Hungarian, including Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir, György Dragomán’s The White King, and Ferenc Barnás’s The Ninth. His translations have appeared in the Paris Review and the Kenyon Review. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN American Center, he lives in North Adams, Massachusetts.
JAN REINHART specializes in the translation of Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese literature into English. He has degrees in Spanish, Portuguese, and journalism, and is finishing his masters in translation. Currently he manages the film and music libraries of Rutgers University. Previously he was a newspaper reporter and cultural journalist.
URSULA MEANY SCOTT is a literary translator based in Dublin and working from French and Spanish. Her translation of Claude Ollier’s novel Wert and the Life Without End was published in 2011. She holds an MPhil in literary translation with distinction from Trinity College, Dublin and was awarded a literary translation fellowship by Dalkey Archive Press in 2009.
ARCH TAIT studied Russian at Cambridge and Moscow Universities and since 1986 has translated eighteen books and many stories and articles by today’s leading Russian writers. His most recent translations are Anna Politkovskaya’s Nothing But the Truth and Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Daniel Stein, Interpreter.
LIZ WATERS translates literary fiction and quality nonfiction from Dutch into English. Her most recent translations include The crisis Caravan by Linda Polman, The Burgher and the Whore by Lotte van de Pol, and Immigrant Nations by Paul Scheffer. She lives in Amsterdam.
JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN works in book publishing. He holds a degree in English with honors from Yale University, where he studied English literature, creative writing, and translation. He has translated several Francophone authors, from Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Pauline Klein to Édouard Levé and Frédéric Beigbeder.
Acknowledgments
Publication of Best European Fiction 2012 was made possible by generous support from the following cultural agencies and embassies:
The Arts Council (Ireland)
Communauté française de Belgique—Promotion des lettres
Cultural Services of the French Embassy
Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru—Welsh Books Council
Embassy of the Principality of Liechtenstein to the United States of America
Embassy of Spain, Washington, D.C.
Estonian Literature Centre
Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI)
The Goethe-Institut New York
Hungarian Book Foundation
Icelandic Literature Fund
The Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia:
Program in Support of Georgian Books and Literature
The Polish Cultural Institute of London
Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council
The Slovenian Book Agency (JAK)
Rights and Permissions
Zsófia Bán: “When There Were Only Animals” © 2011 by Zsófia Bán. Translation © 2011 by Paul Olchváry.
Muharem Bazdulj: “Magic” and “Sarajevo” © 2008 by Muharem Bazdulj. Translation © 2011 by John K. Cox.
Patrick Boltshauser: “Tomorrow It’s Deggendorf” © 2011 by Patrick Boltshauser. Translation © 2011 by Gerald Chapple.
Bjarte Breiteig: “Down There They Don’t Mourn” © 2000 by Bjarte Breiteig. Translation © 2011 by Seán Kinsella.
Duncan Bush: “Bigamy” © 2011 by Duncan Bush.
Arno Camenisch: excerpt from Sez Ner © 2009 by Arno Camenisch. Translation © 2011 by Donal McLaughlin.
Marie Darrieussecq: “Juergen the Perfect Son-in-Law” © 2006 by P.O.L éditeur. Translation © 2011 by Jeffrey Zuckerman.
Danila Davydov: “The Telescope” © 2011 by Danila Davydov. Translation © 2011 by Arch Tait.
David Dephy: “Before the End” © 2011 by David-Dephy Gogibedashvili. Translation © 2011 by Tsisana Gabunia.
Agustín Fernández Paz: “This Strange Lucidity” © 2007 by Agustín Fernández Paz. Translation © 2011 by Jonathan Dunne.
Róbert Gál: excerpt from Agnomia © 2008 by Róbert Gál. Translation © 2011 by Michaela Freeman.
Branko Gradišnik: “Memorinth” © 2011 by Branko Gradišnik. Translation © 2011 by Branko Gradišnik.
Sanneke van Hassel: “Pearl” © 2005 by Sanneke van Hassel. Translation © 2011 by Liz Waters.
Desmond Hogan: “Kennedy” © 2010 by Desmond Hogan.