Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
At the end of October the Southbank Centre put three very different literary evenings within forty-eight hours of each other. On Wednesday 28 October, four novelists from four countries appeared in the Purcell Room as part of a showcase of translated fiction. On Thursday 29 October, in the same room, Tice Cin presented her new novel as a performance of monologue, projection and sound. On Friday 30 October, a function room high up in the Royal Festival Hall hosted the Creative Future Writers’ Award Showcase, fifteen writers who had come through a national competition for under-represented voices. Taken together, they say something useful about how books now reach readers in London.
The season
All three evenings sat in the Southbank Centre’s autumn season, in the centre’s seventy-fifth anniversary year and the year of a London Literature Festival curated by Dua Lipa with her Service95 Book Club. Two of the three, the translated fiction evening and Tice Cin’s performance, were presented with the Service95 Book Club itself.
A pop star’s book club invites the obvious scepticism. These two evenings suggest the choices are not obvious ones. A book club that began in 2023 as a monthly pick and a podcast now puts its name to translated fiction and a genre-crossing performance, not only to headline conversations.
Wednesday 28 October: the translated fiction showcase
The Service95 Book Club: Translated Fiction Showcase, in the Purcell Room, was billed as a live reading and discussion, with the authors reading their own work. It brought together Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Nelio Biedermann (Switzerland), Gaël Faye (Rwanda) and Intan Paramaditha (Indonesia), with Hope Ndaba as moderator.
The line-up is worth reading as a list of routes into English. Biedermann was born in 2003, and his novel Lázár reached MacLehose Press when he was twenty-one; the English edition is translated by Jamie Bulloch. Faye’s Jacaranda, which follows a boy with a French father and a Rwandan mother across four generations, is translated by Sarah Ardizzone and published by Chatto & Windus. Paramaditha’s most recent book, Night of a Thousand Hells, is published by Europa Editions in a translation by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao; Epstein also translated her earlier The Wandering. Schweblin’s English editions are translated by Megan McDowell, most recently the story collection Good and Evil and Other Stories. The listing does not say which of these books was read on the night, and it does not name the translators.
Thursday 29 October: Tice Cin, Safe Spaces
The following evening, in the same room, was Tice Cin’s Safe Spaces, billed as an interdisciplinary performance that adapts her new book, published by Granta. The Southbank describes it as an exploration of grief, music production and her Turkish Cypriot family home, built from monologues, projections, music and sound design. Cin is joined on stage by the performers BODUR and Eliza-Rose, with visuals from her Neoprene Genie team and a score by KMNC and Cin herself.
Cin is the author of Keeping the House, a 2021 debut that won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the British Book Awards. Safe Spaces, a novel about electronic music, love and grief, was won by Granta in a four-way auction and published in September. The Southbank’s decision to give it a performance slot rather than the usual interview is a small but telling one. The book is partly about sound, and a reading from a lectern would have flattened it.
Friday 30 October: the Creative Future Writers’ Award Showcase
The Creative Future Writers’ Award Showcase took place in the Level 5 Function Room of the Royal Festival Hall, hosted by the three judges. The name matters, because this is a showcase rather than a prize-giving: the winners were announced on 15 September, and the evening was where they read their work. It was also streamed live, and the winners’ anthology made its debut there.
Creative Future, a Brighton-based charity, runs what it calls the UK’s only national writing competition for all under-represented writers. This year’s theme was “Material”, and more than 1,850 entries produced fifteen winners across poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, sharing £25,000 in cash and development prizes. The judges were the poet Nancy Campbell, the novelist Courttia Newland and the journalist Kieran Yates, with the prize-givers drawn from Curtis Brown Creative, Faber Academy and The Literary Consultancy.
The Platinum winners give a sense of the range: Maika Carrillo’s creative non-fiction piece “Pagpag”, Debbie Hudson’s short story “How to Dig a Warren”, and Alison Tanik’s poem “Achilles leaves me in Norwood Junction”.
What the week says
The easiest conclusion to draw from these three evenings is that London has a taste for the international and the adventurous. I would draw a narrower one, about credit.
Four authors, four countries, and, in the English editions of their recent books, five translators: Bulloch, Ardizzone, Epstein, Tsao and McDowell. The listing for the translated fiction evening names the authors and their continents and not the translators. That is the habit of the trade, not a failing of this programme, but it is exactly the habit that a showcase of translated fiction ought to be able to break. The English-language reader of Jacaranda meets Faye’s sentences only through Ardizzone’s, and the evening is called a showcase of translation.
The other two evenings answer a different question: who gets to be a writer in a building like the Royal Festival Hall? Cin arrived through a publishing auction and a prize-winning debut; the fifteen Creative Future winners arrived through an open competition judged by a panel of writers. A programme that can carry both in the same weekend is doing its job. It is also, I think, a reminder that the old distinction between the page and the stage is dissolving in one direction, towards performance, while the distinction between the original and the translation is still waiting to dissolve in the other.
What I would watch for next autumn is small and practical: translators’ names on the event page, in the same type as the authors’.
