Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
By Maria Bregman – founder and Editor-in-Chief of Creativity’s UK; writer, filmmaker, and UK Global Talent.
A review of the Service95 Book Club: Translated Fiction Showcase at the Southbank Centre, part of the London Literature Festival, Wednesday 28 October 2026. Part of our coverage of the festival: London Literature Festival 2026 on the South Bank.
Four novelists sat in a row on the stage of the Purcell Room: Samanta Schweblin from Argentina, Nelio Biedermann from Switzerland, Intan Paramaditha from Indonesia and Gaël Faye, Rwandan and French, with an interpreter at his side. Their books stood on a low table in front of them, in English. The people who had made them English were not on the stage, and before the hour was out every one of the authors had said so.
The evening, hosted by Hope Ndaba for the Service95 Book Club, was billed as a showcase of translated fiction. It turned into something more pointed: a conversation about what translation costs, who does the work, and who gets the applause.
Readings
Each author read briefly from their own work. One passage took the audience below the surface of a lake – a woman with stones tied at her waist, counting minutes she can no longer measure, “plankton floating like glitter” – and then, unexpectedly, back up towards the air. Biedermann read the opening of Lázár: the evening of Epiphany at the turn of the century, a translucent child with water-blue eyes born in the western wing of a manor house, next to a blue room that nobody ever entered. Heard aloud in English, the sentence had the slow, dynastic weight of a family saga that already knows how it ends.
Biedermann on history felt from inside
Lázár follows three generations of a Hungarian aristocratic family through the regimes and upheavals of the twentieth century. Biedermann, born in 2003, whose novel reached its English publisher when he was twenty-one, said that he did not set out to write history at all. He began with characters, and only in the writing realised that the private story and the public one could not be separated.
That, he argued, is what fiction is for: “You can read a history book about Hungary in the last century, but that only gives you an idea about the life back then.” He had recently visited the Anne Frank House, and the visit had sharpened the point: such places and such books make you realise that “every number is a human life”.
Asked later whether languages carry different moods, he gave the most surprising answer of the night. His novel, he said, “feels lighter in English than it does in German”, and that is “not the fault of the translator” – the language itself carries a different feeling. As a Swiss writer who writes in German, speaks Swiss German and talks to his German mother in German, he finds his own personality shifting between them. Something is always lost, he concluded, “but there’s hopefully also something gained”.
Faye on memory, trust and the rain in Rwanda
Faye spoke in French, and the room heard him twice – first in his own voice, then in the interpreter’s English. Jacaranda deals with the genocide against the Tutsi, and with how a young man, Milan, comes to learn a history that had stayed distant from him until he travels to Rwanda himself. Faye was precise about what makes genocide different. You do not lose one or two people; you lose a people, and more: the killers, he said, also set out to erase the memories, the photographs, memory itself. Writing such a story is therefore “un travail de mémoire”, a work of memory, and the question of how writing can bring back something of what was lost is one he says he will keep asking all his life.
His answer on translation was the most generous of the evening. “La traduction, c’est aussi un lâcher-prise,” he said – translation is also a letting go. It asks you to trust the person who translates you and to treat them as an artist with their own sensibility and their own language; the only alternative is to refuse to be translated at all.
He then turned this into a gesture. He asked whether his translator, Sarah, was in the room. Sarah Ardizzone, who has translated both Petit Pays and Jacaranda, was there, and he thanked her solemnly in front of everybody. Their first collaboration, he recalled, was a musical reading in Edinburgh. When he finished Jacaranda he asked her to come to Rwanda: “When I talk about the rain, I want you to know exactly how it feels.” So they travelled the country together, and she worked as they went, typing on her laptop.
Asked whether writing about such a history is a duty, he said that each time he finishes a book he promises himself he will stop, because the material has to be metabolised and it is heavy. Then life starts him again. He lives in Rwanda among survivors who do not have writing as a resource, and as artists, he said, “nous avons le devoir de porter cette voix” – we have the duty to carry that voice.
Schweblin on uncertainty
Schweblin’s stories run on unease – we are never sure what we are seeing or whom to believe – and she was asked how that survives translation. “Uncertainty, I think it’s something that we tend to avoid,” she said. “We hate it in real life. It’s so interesting in fiction.” For her it is “tension and it’s attention”, and the difficulty is that it does not live in a single word. It builds across a whole story, like a crescendo, which is why it is hard to write and, she imagined, harder to translate.
She described how her English translator, Megan McDowell, works: sometimes forty questions, each so specific that the care is visible in it. One of them asked whether a character opens a door “in a positive way or in a negative way”. Schweblin loved the question, because nothing she answered would change that line, and yet the translator needed to know to choose the right word. Translators, she said, make the same decisions writers make – whether to pause and explain, or keep going – and they now appear on book covers, which is new. But the work is still not valued as it should be. “It’s us, the authors, who are here talking about translation. Maybe they should be here, not us.”
Paramaditha’s mirror for the respectable
Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells is about three sisters whose youngest commits a suicide bombing; the others must trace the family’s secrets to understand why. She said she prefers to share questions with readers, and offered two. First, how do we take part in violence, willingly or not, while telling ourselves that terrorism is something out there and that we, the educated middle class, are good? The book, she said, is a kind of self-critique, turning a mirror on respectability. Second, whom do we exclude in the name of family and sisterhood? Her sisters have agency, may even be feminists, but they shut out another sister who differs from them in class and gender.
Her method is intertextual, and she named her sources freely: The Thousand and One Nights, King Lear with its three sisters competing for a father’s attention, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, where the house itself is a presence. The English title was reached, she said, after a long discussion with her translators about what readers would and would not catch. For her, what goes missing in translation is not a frustration but “a source of creativity”.
The question of credit
Midway through, the host raised the idea of the “rock star translator” – translators who become almost as well known as their authors, such as Megan McDowell with Schweblin, Antonia Lloyd-Jones with Olga Tokarczuk, or Jordan Stump with Marie NDiaye. The authors took the idea further than the question. “This is the forum where we make the labour visible, right?” said Paramaditha, before naming Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao, who could not travel from Australia and New Zealand, and greeting her Polish translator in the audience. “The translator should be here, not us.”
A full Purcell Room during the London Literature Festival. Photo: Maria Bregman
That is the line I took home. The event listing named four authors and four countries; it did not name a single translator. That is how the trade has always presented translated books, and this festival is no worse than most. But an evening built around translation is exactly where the habit could be broken, and on this occasion the authors broke it themselves, out loud, from the stage.
The last question from the audience went not to an author but to the interpreter, who had worked with Faye that evening for the first time and seemed to anticipate him. How do you build that chemistry so fast? The interpreter had read the book, came the answer, and cried all the way through it. For once, the person carrying the words across was at the centre of attention.
The books
Nelio Biedermann, Lázár, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch (MacLehose Press)
Gaël Faye, Jacaranda, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone (Chatto & Windus)
Intan Paramaditha, Night of a Thousand Hells, translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao (Europa Editions)
Samanta Schweblin, Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
