 Gweithio gweithio gweithio. I'm Janet Smyrachek, head of European Studies here at the British Library. It's my great pleasure to welcome you all this evening to European Literature Night. It's the fifth year that we've held this event here in the British Library Conference Centre, and European Literature Night has really become one of the annual highlights of our literary events programme. The British Library's literature collections range from literary archives to sound recordings and a vast array of printed fiction, poetry and drama and critical texts about them. Whether you're looking for one of the only three surviving copies of the first edition of the 15th century Catalan romance Tiran Le Blanc, early editions of Goethe in the original translation, or a 21st century graphic novel version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, you will find them here. Through our events, exhibitions and our website, we aim to make the most of the expertise of our curators to inspire the widest public and bring our extensive collections to life for new audiences. We're also involved in a number of collaborative projects exploring literature in translation, so I think all this makes us the British Library a natural home for the London celebration of European Literature Night. Tonight, we're going to have the unique experience of listening to eight outstanding writers from around Europe discussing their work, and then there will be readings. Having taken part in the selection panel and participated in an open university collaborative seminar this afternoon with some of the writers and translators, I can promise you a really enlightening and inspiring evening. European Literature Night also brings us in the British Library the opportunity to collaborate with a range of partners who share a common goal to improve access for UK audiences to the very best of European culture in all its diversity. The European Commission representation in the UK, cultural institutes including the Czech Centre who initiated European Literature Night, publishers, translators, speaking volumes who produce our event, our chair and passionate advocate of European Literature, Rosie Goldsmith, and last but by no means least, UNIC, the Network of European Union Cultural Relations Institutes. All have played their part in bringing together the writers, the translators and you the audience this evening for our exciting event. Thanks also to the Spanish Embassy who are sponsoring a reception to which you're all invited after the event. I just want to check, by the way, that you do realise this is a literary event. There are so many of you. I'm used to ten people and a glass of wine. It's not Eurovision Song Contest or anything, but anyway, it is really fantastic to have such a great audience tonight. The fact that European Literature Night, and you've heard some great speeches from Janet and Dorian, the fact that European Literature Night is taking place for the fifth time is really something to celebrate and the fifth time here at the British Library also. Not least because, as has already been said, we live in shockingly Eurosceptic times and I feel incredibly strongly about this. European Literature Night is a cultural vote for Europe. So tonight, at least, you are in Europe. We've shut the door. There's no going out. What we've witnessed over the last five years is unfortunately only 1.5% growth, but I feel a bit embarrassed, it's not a bit more, but we have witnessed a phenomenal growth really in interest in international literature and there's been much more translated, much more published. There are figures to support all this. I'm a journalist, I should give you statistics all the time, but this is our precious literature. Last year we had three of our writers were longlisted for the independent foreign fiction prize and this year of our eight writers, every single one of them has won major prizes in their own country. These are really major writers. We should have an evening for every single one of them. You're going to hear tonight from eight writers. Now what we do with European Literature Night, it champions the best contemporary European literature in English. It's not a competition. There are no prizes and the main criteria are very, very simple indeed. Excellent literature, excellent translation and let's hope excellent entertainment. No pressure. You can sing and dance too if you like, if that's the way to do it. Just very, very quickly about the selection process. I don't want you to think that I just sat down in a drunken stupor and say, yeah, I'll like that one and that one. This is actually teamwork. We have a group of judges. I'd like to thank Christine Jensen who hasn't been thanked yet and also Janet and Renata Clarke as well who's been fantastic speaking volumes and the one and only Daniel Hahn who I know is here. Danny is and all of us, we're all judges for this particular event. We had, for the first time, we started in November. In January a call went out to all the publishers and agents and so on for their writers and we had 69 extracts. We read every single one of them. That was 20 more than last year and that's from all 27 participating countries. And then in February, thanks to Free Words Centre, we sat down for at least four hours with a packet of biscuits and we whittled the 69 down to eight. It was incredibly difficult. Tonight's eight writers are true stars. They're all famous in their own countries and after tonight they should be here too, and if not, you're at fault. Each writer here will talk to me about their work in English at the end and there'll be some readings at the end. There'll be books out there and authors to chat with and you can talk on your phones whenever. And a glass of wine. We have three regions or countries for the very first time this year. Slovenia, Catalonia and Turkey. Yes, we have Turkey. We will talk about that. We have Belgium and Netherlands. We didn't want them to fight for supremacy, so we thought we'd just have both of them. And we have the consistently brilliant Czech Republic. It must be something in the beer. We have them every year. We begin though with Germany and Austria and we definitely don't want them fighting. First of all, we're going to start with an absolutely incredible book. For all the judges, this book was a no-brainer. It's a remarkable book. It's a seamless knitting together of stories, characters and plot. It's set in Berlin just after the fall of the wall. It's a stream of consciousness. It's a family saga which doesn't miss a beat. It's funny and fluid. It's short and bittersweet. It's a dream translation. Thank you to Jamie Bullock of a modern German classic. Welcome to Birgit van der Beker from Germany to talk about the muscle feast. Birgit, it's a great honour to have you here. You wrote this book a long time ago, 1989, 1990. It was published in Germany. It's thanks to our publisher here, Pirini Press, that it's finally been translated into English. How does it feel to go back so far in time to reconsider that novel? Well actually it is not going back because this first book did never leave me. It's always with me. And why is that? It was your first book so it was obviously very special for that reason. It is very special. It is an astonishing phenomenon called Everseller in Germany. Called? Everseller. Everseller. It's also a bestseller. No, it sells all the time. It's out of history. Nobody knows why. Maybe because it's a very good book. But I'm feeding you the lines here. I can say it. Now tell us a little bit about your background. You wrote this book, as I say, it's your first novel. You've written many, many since then. But this one was very special. It captured a moment in time, 1989. The Wall had just fallen. No, it has not yet fallen. It had not fallen. Tell us about the premise of this book, the background of this book. I wrote this book in August 1989 before the Wall fall. Where were you when you wrote it? In Frankfurt. But it was a special situation. I would call it a historical gap. Everybody knew that something would happen in Germany, but nobody knew what. It was a nervous atmosphere. The people in the east started to go further east. They started their demonstrations on Mondays. We all feared that the government would choose the Chinese solution. Crack down. Crack down violence. Everybody was in a gap. I wrote this text in three weeks. Your family originally came from the GDR. You were quite young when you came over. Five years old. You were five years old. Were you watching it as an East German at that time? Yes. My own experience was not so lucky. I was afraid when the East would become West. This would be a collective problem. What made you write this particular book with this particular subject? It's a novella. It's a very short book, but it's perfect. All my books are short books. You started off doing that, and you continue doing that. It's called the muscle feast. The muscle meal in the correct English. It's in German. Why muscles and why was it a meal? It's a family meal. Tell us about the actual book. The muscles are a perfect metaphor. Metaphor. I don't know why it was a perfect metaphor, but it is evident. I think people think that Germans eat a lot of muscles. No, not at all. In Cologne, but not in Germany. The book starts off where you have the mother who has been... It takes place in just a few hours, four hours. It's like one long, continuous sentence. The mother has been washing the muscles individually in the bath. They're very difficult to wash, as you know. There are two teenage children, a boy and a girl, and they're waiting for the father to come home. Tell us about the father, because he's a very special figure, a very interesting man. He's absent. It's all about him. He's not very short, but it's all about him. In the beginning he seems to be the perfect father, and the muscles are prepared to have a feast. To celebrate his homecoming. But he's absent. If the evening becomes later and later, the three persons start telling stories about the father. About this perfect family they are. It turns out that it's not such a perfect father. In the end, we have four hours to destroy this perfect family. Basically, the image of... Nobody eats the muscles. The muscles sit there on the table, cooked. If you're around the table and the muscles are on the table, the father is not there, and three persons destroy a family. It's a tragic book in many ways. You tell it with great humour and beautiful language, but it's the story of a terrible man, an awful man. It's a terrible story, but it's the story you can laugh out loudly when you read it. I laughed out loudly when I wrote it. It's got some fantastic phrases in it. But this man is... He's a bully, he's a tyrant. Nothing can please him. His children don't make him happy. He criticises his wife. Where did you find such a man? Did you know such a man? Well, no. No. It's pure imagination. What were you trying to say with this book? It's not just about this small family. It's about... It's a tyrannic system, and these three persons destroy it, but without any hope for a new system. So it's tragic. You said something on the back of the book, I think, about how interested you are in how revolutions start. You'd think when you read this book it's just about a family, because you hear about their lives, and less about politics and so on, less about the location. But you say it's a political book. So just tell me a little bit more about that, because obviously in that particular time in Germany... In this August I asked me how revolutions can function, can work. And I had to work on a family story because I didn't know what would happen in our country. What do you think about what's happened? It was nearly 25 years ago. It's tragic. Have you written about this topic in other books? Because of course we have one book in English. I'm always very close to the German events. You live in France, is that right? So you can observe it even more. I like to have a thousand kilometre distance. Birgit, you're going to read for us from this book. This is The Muscle Feast. As I say, it's been translated by Jamie Bullock, and it's published by Pyrenew Press. It's nominated by Pyrene and Birgit van der Beek is going to read. I present you The Muscles. The noise came from the pot. And as I glanced over, I couldn't help looking at the clock, too. It said three minutes past six. And at that moment, my mood changed abruptly. I stared at the noisy pot, and although I knew that the muscles were still alive, I didn't know that they made noises in the pot because I was never around when my parents cooked mussels. Initially I wondered whether the noise was coming from somewhere else, but it was distinctly coming from the pot and it was distinctly strange noise which made me feel creepy. We were already twitchy and nervous, and now there was this noise. I stared at the pot and I stopped cutting the potatoes into battans because the noise was driving me mad and the hair on my arms stood on end. This always happens when I get a creepy feeling, and unfortunately it shows because the hair on my arm is black, so now my mother could see that I was spooked, although she didn't realise the cause was the noise of the mussels from the pot. As for her, it wasn't a strange noise. Can't you hear anything I asked? Listen, it's mussels, my mother said, and I remember saying, isn't it awful? I mean, I knew that they were still alive. It's just that I'd never imagined that they would make that rattling noise with their shells. I'd imagined they'd be cooked, eaten, and that was it. And my mother said they're opening up and then the entire heap of mussels would start moving. How horrible, I thought. The entire heap of mussels will move because they're opening. Of course I didn't empathise with them. I do eat them after all, even if I don't particularly care for mussels. And it's obvious that they're alive beforehand and not alive when I eat them. I eat oysters too, even though I know that they're still alive when I eat them, but they don't make that noise. Actually, I was kind of angry at the mussels for opening instead of lying silently in a heap. I said, don't you find it obscene that they open and make that noise obscene and indiscreet? But at the same time, I probably thought it was indiscreet because we were going to kill them. I'd rather not have had to think about the fact that they were alive beforehand. When they are lying there, jet black and closed, you don't really need to imagine that they are alive. You can pretty much regard them as objects, and then there's no problem tipping them into boiling water. But if you consider that they are alive, then it's creepy. If we were to cook them now, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking that we were killing them. Although I found the mussels creepy, I went over and I didn't want to be cowardly, and they looked revolting, lying there, some opening slowly, fairly slowly, and then the entire heap of them started to move with this rattling sound. Unbelievable, I said, how revolting these creatures are gasping as instead of seawater, they get air which they can't breathe, and they are also being scarled in the boiling water, and then they all open, which means they are dead. The thought suddenly occurred to me that maybe it was only revolting because I knew we were killing them. Maybe it wouldn't have looked so disgusting otherwise. I remember having seen half-opened mussels on the beach without feeling anything. I even threw some of them back into the sea, but not out of any real pity and not all of them, just for fun. Anyway, I didn't find them creepy or revolting like these others here. My mother and my brother cut the last few potatoes into battans, acting as if they hadn't been listening. Finally, I said that if you knew someone was going to die in an hour, let's say, do you think you'd find them revolting? I'm positive you would simply because you knew and it would be even worse if you had to kill them yourself like we were killing the mussels. Such thoughts plunged me into a real morbid mood while the other two acted as if they weren't listening. It's mass murder, I said, all of them at once, at the same time by boiling water the mussels got me so worked up the mussels had created a morbid atmosphere in the room. It's unbearable, I said, to which my mother replied sternly, what are you talking about? You can tell it is actually a very funny novel as well too. One of the things I love too is another passage about the all-German stamp collection. Do read it, you'll find out what I mean. We're going from a turning point in 1989 to another turning point, the end of communism in Germany to the end of communism in the Balkans in the early 90s. Our first two guests are both looking at similar turning points and the impact on ordinary people as they go through these struggles. Austria's literature has featured in all our European literature night events over the last five years and tonight's Austrian offering, Winters in the Sun, is a riveting novel. It's a dissection of a marriage, it's a father-daughter relationship and it's also about war. Norbert Castrain has been awarded the Alfred Durblin Prize and the Uwe Jonsson Prize and these are major prizes in the German-speaking world. His first novel in English in 2002, which was titled The English Years, was described by none other than W.G. Siebert or Hale, of course, as an exceptional piece of prose fiction and his second novel, I can absolutely guarantee, Hand on Heart, is also exceptional. Welcome to Norbert Castrain. I actually mean it when I say these things, by the way. I really mean it. Now I feel embarrassed that we've not had you here before but I'm so pleased that we've finally got you here at European Literature Night. Now you are an interesting species because you were a mathematician were you not at some point and you became a writer. I was not a mathematician, I studied mathematics and that was it. I tried to become one and I wanted to become one and before I had the chance I wrote my first book and that was an alternative. I don't know if it was the right alternative because I tried to find out. By the way, it's nothing very special. There are lots of mathematicians or scientists who turn out to be writers in the end. So it's not just me. There are fewer others. I think somebody might have done a thesis on this, I'm sure. Now we know you buy two books in English. You've written many more. Are you happy that we know you through these two books? Are these two books that you're particularly proud of? They represent what you feel strongly about in writing. I don't know. I'm always in the future. In the new book I'm always in the unpublished books. These books are all gone books to me and things happen to them and I watch things happening to them and I can't choose. So my English publisher decided to take these books and I think it's a good decision. How does it feel when you come in and you discuss this book which is for us a new book because it's in English and we're talking about it for the first time. Does it feel like a new book in any way to you? It does because I've read it in a new language. I've read it in English and it's a different book. It's not my language and it's a foreign book. I like to read in the English language because it's a totally different kind of reading to me. When I read in German I always look how is the writer doing it and when I read in English or in another foreign language I read like I've read as a child or as a youth and it's much more fun to read in English or in a foreign language than to read in their own language. You also have two wonderful translators of this book. Anthea Bell and Julian Evans. You're very lucky indeed. I am and Julian is here and he's going to do the reading. First I'm going to make you work a little bit harder. I'm very lucky of course. You are indeed. You could have read it too. Your English is wonderful. You are sort of representing Austria in a Eurovision song contest. I'm not going to make you sing the Austrian song because it is a Eurovision song contest this week as you all know. Obviously writing about Vienna is not enough for you. In this particular book you write about Argentina and Croatia and Austria. You're a traveller aren't you really? You travel a lot. You do a lot of your research abroad as well. Austria is always there somewhere isn't it? Austria is there somewhere but I live outside of the country and I've been living for about like for the last 20 years I haven't been living in Austria. More by chance than by a decision but it's good to have 1,000 kilometres. The same 1,000 kilometres as Birgit van der Beker because it's a good thing not to care too much about the day to day things. Especially the Austrian day to day things. I don't like to read Austrian newspapers. I'm always glad when I don't see them and when I'm in the country I read them and I don't like to read them. You have a journalist as one of the main characters in this book an Austrian journalist but I don't think you like him very much. He doesn't come over as being a favourite character. No he's quite self-obsessed. The novel is the story of a father and the daughter and the father who has fled from Croatia after the war. He's a fascist paratrooper and he went to South America and the daughter went to Vienna before the end of the war and got married to this journalist who is a left-leaning leftist journalist and who confronts her with her family history and the way he does it I don't like because it's the Daniel Goldhorn way. If you know what I mean. Like you could inherit being a fascist and of course that's nonsense. So the main characters are Maria, the daughter and the old man you call him her father. She doesn't know initially that her father is alive. He was as you say he was a fascist in the Second World War and then went to Argentina and built up a new life in Buenos Aires. And then when the Balkan Wars when Yugoslavia begins to break up in the early 90s that's when he sees his moment doesn't he? What does it he wants to go back and do 50 years later? It's also a novel about frozen time. He thinks he can go on with these crazy political thoughts. He's in his 70s though isn't he? He's 70 though he has some money and he thinks he can spend money in the new wars but there have been people from Croatia in overseas countries in northern America and southern America who spent who gave money to the new wars in Yugoslavia and he's one of these characters and there was a small chance that these political crazy ideas could have been implemented again. I was thinking about a character who had some fictional credibility thinking these thoughts. No Austrian, no German could think seriously of implementing a fourth Reich but in Croatia it was a serious even though a small possibility it was a serious possibility to think. Why did you choose Croatia and Argentina? Why these particular parts of the world? What was it that fascinated you about Yugoslavia at that time? I had another novel about Yugoslavia and about the war there, about the wars there and about how you can write about war. The German title is The Sandvector's Totents a novel which I think my publisher should have published in English because... Your publisher is here. For me, for my writing and for my development as a writer it is a very important novel though it's considered to be a complicated novel and maybe that's one of the reasons why it's not translated. It's a novel in which I try to think how you can write about war and one of the starting points for this novel and then also for the second novel about Yugoslavia was that one of my friends was killed in Kosovo at the end of the war there. He was a journalist working for a German magazine and I started thinking is it morally possible to take the death of a real person and take this as a starting point for another? Actually it was a big problem in Germany it was a big or maybe a small scandal that I did this. The fact that you write about war and war is very central to your at least the novels you've been talking about in a way I want to also emphasise the fact that these are incredibly private personal stories you're not just going out and describing battlefields you're describing how war and struggle actually impact on the people on the daughter Maria who goes out to Zalgreb to try to find herself but also to try to understand her marriage and eventually possibly meet up with her father. I mean these are incredibly intense emotional novels. This novel, Windows in the South is more about the impacts of war on private life than about war itself about the impacts on the life of Maria and there's a motto at the beginning of the novel and the motto is it's war baby it's war so it's somehow the story of a woman who comes in between two wars the second world war represented by her father was in Yugoslavia. Well let's hear a reading from this remarkable book Julian Evans who is one of the translators of the book is going to read a passage for us. This is Winters in the South it's translated by Anthea Bell and Julian Evans and it's published by Maclehoes Press and I'd like to say happy fifth birthday to Maclehoes as well. Hello, this is a symphonic novel at least I found it a symphonic novel and these are the opening bars of a book of many many themes. It was in her second month in Zagreb in the autumn the war began that the news reached Maria that made her life foreign to her forever. She hadn't set eyes on her father for more than 45 years and had thought he was dead for almost as long so at first she didn't react at all to the advertisement that the neighbours had left outside her door and that couldn't possibly have been from him. There had to be some misunderstanding even though when the same thing happened again a few days later she hurried down the street bought a copy of the paper at a kiosk unfolded it in the teeth of the wind and with the feeling that objects around her were losing their outlines and blurring shapelessly together stared at the not especially large boxed ad in the middle of the miscellaneous section. A week went by in which she did nothing but felt constantly uneasy and then when she finally came across a further advertisement as she sat one day at a cafe table tears immediately welled in her eyes and she looked around to see if people at other tables were watching her and had noticed what was happening. In December the previous year she'd had her 50th birthday she and her husband had spent a week on Elba and his clumsy attentions there had made her suspect that once again he had a lover. In the middle of the day she sat with him swaddled in a rug in the sun and looking out at the sea didn't know whether she could smell it in the damp air or see it far away at the line of the horizon or hear it but as hard as she tried not to give in to gloomy calculations about her birthday it was at that exact moment as time stood still in which she realised how fast it was flying by Although at home they'd slept separately for a long time for these few days they took a double room and in the end she decided to reward his efforts to show her how much she still desired her bent over him with quick motions of her hand brought to life the dormant worm she'd once summoned like a snake charmer like a snake charmer by the tenderest nicknames he stopped working on him when twitching limply he came heedlessly in her mouth then that was behind her accompanied by the lengthy apologies he always made when he didn't manage to come out of her in time and the next morning he didn't know how to face her surreptitiously casting her the despairing glances of the boarding school boy he'd once been and joking with the young English women who shared the breakfast room at their hotel while she sat beside him in silence and thought how does his longing compare with mine? I could be just like those overdressed ladies and set out to explore the island in a large and completely unseasonable hat too I could be a girl again for a day Back in Vienna she let a few months go by before she finally asked him more in flattery than because she really wanted to know why he was out so often in the evenings it wouldn't have been a catastrophe for her to hear the truth and she watched him as he went round and round in circles until he'd gone so far in his evasions that he was ready to hear anything she might say and reply so then she asked him if he had anything against her going to Zagreb for a while and was annoyed with herself for weakening as soon as she'd said it it would only be for the summer Thank you very, very much indeed We had eight check entries this year it was very, very hard to choose but the devil's workshop hot off the press this month from Portobello Books and winner of the 2013 English Pen Award for Outstanding Writing in Translation is unlike anything you'll ever read ever and it will stay with you for a very long time to come and it's proof for me that some of the most interesting writing and unusual writing, thought provoking writing today comes from the former East It's a privilege to welcome Yachon Topol one of the great dissident writers before the Velvet Revolution and a leading prose writer and poet in the Czech Republic today Yachon, nice to see you Now, when I call you Don't worry, I have to do it very slowly I'll be very slow, I promise and if you want me to repeat something or maybe Teresa can even translate maybe Let's see how we go Yachon, I can look into your eyes We'll try and make it work Now look, when I call you a Samizdat poet or writer Do you feel proud of that? Is that all passed or gone, finished? When you are a Samizdat poet you will, it will I remember everything so I don't think I'm changed When you write in the time of Samizdat, it's the era of communism and you are part of this so-called underground It's only a situation, it's only a political situation but I'm sure that my writing is the same So you don't write differently from underground, overground? Absolutely, especially here in British Library or where I am, because yesterday I was in Amsterdam before I was in Dublin in the Irish Library so I think it's overground Well probably here in the British Library they've got books of yours from before as well so that would be interesting for you to find out because I do not write a science fiction like it from future I think every writer writes from the memory Graham Greene once thought that the memory is one of the most important thing for a writer Tell us what you do write What do you write today? You write novels, poetry, films, theatre? I think the biggest thing for me is to write a novel It's a challenge, it's something It's not easy Now, because I have no time, I'm very quick and so on I have children, small children, my parents are all blah blah So I start to write short stories but it's a problem because I couldn't believe in short stories because after Bunin, after Anton Pavlovich Chechow Isaac Babel, all these giants Isaac Basheff is a singer So short stories, you should write a novel a long book and you think about suicide You are alone, depressed, drunk sometimes and it's not now and it's part of your life Sorry, maybe I'm too pathetic It's because I have a small problem I don't understand your English When I have reading in Hungary or Amsterdam it's okay but here I am talking too much Just keep talking, it's fantastic what you're saying You don't need questions from me But we are serious people We can laugh, they're laughing This is a short novel Is that easier? My first novel, Sister it was published in the United States It has 600 pages and it's, I don't know, 12 years ago So I feel like this animal lives in the river and eating wood Bober Yes, exactly I am making from the whole trees I'm making only one Yes So first book, 500-600 pages The last one 200 But do you understand my English? Absolutely, don't worry about it Don't be polite, I have no education I'm trying to do my best I feel like here in England I feel like Jimmy Hawkins in the pirate ship Who's Jimmy Hawkins? I'm talking about British literature Robert Louis Stevenson The Island of Treasures So I feel like this small boy Jimmy Hawkins Let's talk though about this amazing book This book You've got to believe me is an amazing book Do you like my book? We loved it Happy to be here We really loved it Where are my judges? Didn't we just love this book? Make the man feel better about it It's an amazing book Let's talk about this book It's like LSD Let's give you some more literary LSD I'm going to take you out of your misery briefly to explain what this book is about I'll give a short description of the book and then we'll talk a little bit about it just to give you some breathing space here It's good The book is comedy but it's very sad It is very sad but it's very funny too Who would have thought it would be so funny? It's about concentration camps This is a book in two locations and two parts It's set partly in the Czech Republic partly in Belarus You could not imagine two grimmer locations because I'm not saying the Czech Republic is grim Terazinstadt Terazin which is where half the book takes place is, as we all know, one of the great awful monuments to ghetto Terazin and then it takes place partly in Belarus in Minsk as well where as we also know but we don't know enough about how many thousands of people were killed there This book is about a young man who grows up in Terazin Terazinstadt In the modern times he gathers together groups of young people from all over the world who come to this place to search for information about their grandparents who died in the ghetto He sets up a commune as an alternative place of remembrance and they have Kafka t-shirts They produce a ghetto pizza Things like this is where it is very funny They have therapy sessions for all these young people This new project is very unwelcome by the official Terazinstadt tourist memorial people The camp is then marked for demolition and one of the survivors begins his campaign to save it Then there is a crackdown and the authorities bulldoze it The narrator flees to Minsk The aid of two more young people All he takes with him is the key to a safe deposit box and a USB stick storing the contact data of rich Holocaust survivors These are meant to be funders of this new project in Minsk It's an extraordinary topic What on earth made you choose this bold, provocative, difficult topic in a way a comic novel? I'm thinking that I was working about 20 years on this book 20 years? Yes, and maybe and especially from the year 1989 the time of East European revolutions I spent never ending time in Ukraine in Poland, in Slovakia in Belarusia, in Romania in East Europe or so called East Europe Everywhere I had meetings with these demons and it became obsession some sort of obsession and I think it's typical for every writer your theme, your topic must became obsession and I'm waiting for books 10 years, 5 years and when it's still here I'm trying to find time to write it down I know this book about ghosts or demons of course and when you were talking about Teresianstadt you mentioned these young people it was the biggest shock for me at the beginning I was thinking oh my god, I'm still thinking about war and maybe I'm sick and so on then I was travelling into Teresianstadt and I was making TV reportage and so on and I saw there are some people mostly young people these freaks and I find they are the third or fourth generation of holocaust then I was looking into the books and it really exists, sort of sickness so it was the beginning then I really was in Belarusia looking for it it's not long there's a lot in it there are so many people here you don't need to look at them, it's just you and me in the end are you criticising the holocaust industry what do you find me saying? I'm trying to make some jokes I've write about this industry with the black humor but I'm not criticising I don't know what to think about maybe this is the best way to make Disneyland from it no, keep going we should still go to this place because I'm from Prague and in Prague one of the icons or a fetish of Prague is a Franz Kafka t-shirt and these people in Theresienstadt they have this idea to make t-shirts with Theresienstadt just to make another keach from it and I was shocked then I was thinking why not? maybe it's not easy if you have, for example, ghetto pizza in Krakow it's brilliant and it's bleak the book is full of it but I am not really criticising I don't know what to do with it but it's an absolutely wonderful book and it makes you laugh but does it make you cry as well we're going to hear a reading of this book and we have somebody to read an extract for us Sarah Sanders is going to come and read for us it's a reading from the devil's workshop and it's translated by Alex Zucker and it's published by wonderful Portobello books it's been nominated by the Czech Centre Sarah, you're going to read a little bit and check? you want to? first, okay just to show you the beautiful language of Czech people I don't know how much I've seen a big country with no concrete stones in the village houses there are always muds and a lot of broken stairs the stones are always round like a brick wall but it's a brick wall I'm on the road with black stones leading to the destroyed castle I'll show you Alex is saying it to his museum the quiet boy and he'll fall for you what's hanging on my neck on the one I forgot we have to go to Swah I'm glad that a bum from Alex has a hood Alex is wearing a cap on his head this is a riddle there were hundreds of thousands not like in your country I'd like to express the words yes, they tried it they just expressed 300,000 not like in your country and why did he wear it why did he wear it aha because it's a long time ago I'm telling him quite normally because he's hanging on my neck on his neck now but he's wearing a hood Alex, did he wear it the hundreds of thousands because he was bossing around Germany but the Russians killed him the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians because nobody wants to be on the way and you know I'm saying it right to you, all the way through half of Europe are the smithers the hyps and the 300,000 and the stilers so that the baby would be pwede but the viewer you know and without any credit we'll find out that the roads from the black stone na schwal. Eto pomni gwestnitse, nebo pamatnik. Jaill sem hrdei Bielorus, pofidda Alex. Mialen nezaimhaen, sgrad drannikia, a chywcet na telefizi, ani demonstrofa ta haze chywtram, a mnezaimhaen pamietnároda, dystratimhaen sgwmynolost, nebudimhaen mynd ani budoucnos, nebudimhaen mech hapes. Jo, Alexi, tohle byd tech pofaziofal za úplni neilepsi, a chywcet na'r hyn, a chyfnodd ddim, a ddechrau, a rai o'r llythau. A chyfnodd rôl, a'r llythau, a'r llygw, a ddim yn bydd y cwyrdd. Chyfnodd y teimlo, a'r llygw'r llygw. Mae'r llygw i'r llygw. A'r llygw i'r llygw i'r llygw a'r llygw i'r llygw. Mae'r llygw i'r llygw i'r llygw a ddrym yn ddaeth y cityr, a'r llwyddi ar y cymdeithas yn y lle, a'r llwyddi ar mynd, a'r llwyddi ar y chymd, yn gwylo'r gweithio, ac yn y cael gweithio'r gweithio. Rwyf am eu rhaid, yn cymdiddio gweithio'r gweith, i weithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Rwyf, rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r llwyddi'roi'r wyfyd, Alex says, ysnydd, byd yna mi'r drwyf. Rwyf yn gwneud hefyd yn eu cyfnwyr, ac yn ddysgwyl, mae'r amser yn ffront yn ymlaen i ddweud i mi ar gyfer hyn. Yn ymwynt. Rhywbeth mae'n gweithio y rhai Alex i Mi yn ffordd. Efallai eich hyn yn cyflawn o Isi Rhaen, ddim yn Alex wedi bod yn rhan oherwydd yr hyn yn cyd. Roedden i'n cael unrhyw yw cael unrhyw ymlaen i'r byd. Roedden i ddechrau'r rhain, rhaf yn dda i ymddill i fynd. Roedden i'r rhain i'r rhain i'r rhain i'r rhain? Here, 300,000 they killed, and nobody in the west knows. How come it got swept under the rug? How come nobody talks about it, huh? It was a long time ago, I say in a normal voice. The noose is pretty tight now. It isn't choking me anymore. Bullshit, Alex Yalps. It got swept under the rug because the Germans were in charge. But the ones who did the killing were Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians. They did it for money and everybody keeps quiet about it because nobody wants to piss Putin off. Get it? I nod. Slovak soldiers were stationed in Oktybrusk, where too many people got slaughtered and burned to even count. About ten of them were my relatives. Awful, I say. All those spoiled bunk seekers coming half-way across Europe so Libo can blow on their wounds and make it better. All those hippie counts naïve bitches with their parents' credit cards and fabulous passports. Everyone here is a seeker, get it? And you can bet your ass they don't have any credit. It dawns on me that the paths here are made out of black stone for a reason. It's a monument to the village, or a memorial. I'm proud to be Belarusian, Alex says. But I don't just want to sit around eating geniki and watching TV or protest and throw stones. I want to preserve the nation's memory. If we lose our paths, we lose our future. We won't exist, get it? Yes, Alex, I get it. I wish you didn't exist. That's what I think, I don't say it. I can't live like that, very forever along with our dead like we were some kind of demons. Can you even see what I mean? Do you fucking understand? He tugs on the rope around my neck. That bothers me. Hey, Alex, I need to tie my shoe, okay? I hunch over and look to see if there's a stone I can grab. Nobody's going to tell me what to do anymore. Your shoes are fine, Alex says calmly. Just come on. So I get up and we go. I guess he knows that trick. He lets go of the rope and gives me a friendly slap on the back. He knew the whole time he was choking me. Look, he gestures grandly into the mist. We're going to build a huge car park for buses over there. Kiosks, like they have in Auschwitz. Resurface the road. Oh, you think the tourists would like it more if it was bumpy? We could put in a rainforest. They don't have that at home. What do you think? Work, you cunt. You're the expert. Rainforests are nasty, I tell them truthfully. Hot, muggy, terrible weather. The tourists will tell them to go fuck off. The birds here aren't nice like they are in Terracun. Only now do I notice that all the chimneys have signs on them. Naviki, Navica, 50, 42, 14, 5, 3, 1. Names of the dead and ages of the dead. This just isn't going to do the trick, Alex says, waving his hands around the units. Some boring old-style memorial that won't get the attention of the new Europeans. Look at the poles and that catine of theirs. A step ahead again. They're shooting a movie about it. And what about our catine? Nobody's ever heard of it. All of a sudden, Alex jumps up on a wall and shouts, Listen to me, you heroic poles. The people who got murdered here in Catine weren't officers who could defend themselves. He jumps down, grabs the rope and starts talking normally again. They forced the men to run around in a circle till they got tired. Then they herded them into a barn and set fire to it. They used another barn for the women and children. Why didn't the people resist? Because slavs are stupid brutes? No, they just didn't believe it. Right up to the last minute, throwing kids in the fire, why would someone do that? Nobody thought it would happen until it actually did. The killers had it all worked out. We start walking back towards the tent. I learned something there in Terracin. Alex gives me a punch in the shoulder. Oral history. The most important thing is the story. Authenticity. That's what Lebo said, right? We both stopped short. Lebo, that's right. This is Belarus, my friend. No Kafka t-shirts are going to help us here. Thank you. Thanks so much to Sarah and to Yachim. I mean, these books alone, the ones you've heard already, are a testament to the fact that we must be... We must just translate more of this foreign fiction. These are stunning books. I mean, I don't think anybody in Britain could have written that book, for instance. And these are topics that we all need to know about. And speaking of which things that we need to know about, we are really delighted to, for the very first time to have Catalan represented here at European Literature Night. And with such wonderful writing. Last year, Kim Monzo was nominated but couldn't make it. Of course I'd love to do all the research in situ and maybe I should make it part of my contract to go out to each country beforehand. But unfortunately not. But I have been able to bring the writers here. Now, we all loved this novel, Lost Luggage. It's a translation from the Catalan. It's a story of identity, migration and language. It's about four brothers. They're all named Christopher. And they all have the same father, but different mothers. And they've never met. They know nothing about each other until one day the father disappears. Now, the author of this book is an extraordinary man and writer. His name is Yordi Pwnti. Welcome to Yordi Pwnti. And this is the first time I've actually seen the finished book. So I've been reading PDFs and extracts. How hot off the press these books are. Many of them are being published just for the occasion. And you're welcome, Yordi. Let's get this afternoon. Do you call yourself Spanish, Catalan? I call myself Yordi. No, I call myself Yordi. I'm Catalan. And then I have my national document, official document that says I'm Spanish. So I guess I'm Catalan. Because my mother and my father are Catalans. And I'm Spanish because I was born in Spain. So look, as you are our first Catalan writer, we're going to make you work a little bit harder to explain a little bit more about Catalan writing and literature too. I mean, why is it important to have Catalan writing as separate from Spanish? Or do you work together in happy harmony? I think we writers live together in harmony, Catalan and Spanish. I have many very good friends who write in Spanish, living in Barcelona. Actually in Barcelona, there are many very good... I think some of the most important Spanish writers are from Barcelona and live in Barcelona. I think we have to live together. And we are both all part of the Spanish culture, if you want to say it, because we come from different languages, which all the two of them have a very, very long story and as a language and as a literature. Starting almost at the same time, like many of the other European and Latin literatures. Catalan literature started to really take off after democracy, I imagine. I wouldn't say that. I would say after democracy, of course, during the Franco years, it was banned and it was forbidden. There were some writers who were still writing in the exile and some others who were still writing in Barcelona or in Catalonia, but they couldn't publish. So around the early sixties, the Franco government started to be a bit less strong and they started to allow after censorship, of course, to be published certain novels. So we could say that after the Franco and the democracy, well, the Catalan literature had, you know, started to spring again. But there is a big, big like your director here said that there's great novels from the 15th century. One of them is one of the copies is here from Tiran Lublan, for example. In the British Library. Now, you are your translator. You are a journalist. You're a football fanatic, I think as well. I think that's pretty big on your CV, actually. If you are from Barcelona, you have to be a football fanatic. You're particularly well-known in Spanish or Catalan for your short stories. But this is a novel. Was it hard to write? This is your first novel. It took me seven years to write it. I think it's... When I hear the 20 years thing, I think, wow, it's like writing short stories. It took me such a long time because I realized that my short stories were becoming more and more long stories. And the idea of cutting them to make them short didn't appeal to me. I liked the idea more like blossoming stories. When a minor character gets more important, so you don't cut it, you give him more space. So then one day I started to think about, no, no, I should write a novel. I shouldn't write short stories and this came to my mind. Now, let's talk about lost luggage and I know you're going to read something as well for us. This is, as I say, we all loved it. I couldn't believe that this is your first novel. After all the writing you've done as well as a journalist and so on, too. I highly recommend you write another novel. Thank you. Tell us about this one because it's a fantastic story. Four brothers, all called Christopher, and one father. Yeah, exactly. That's the story of Gabriel de la Cruz. Gabriel is the father. Gabriel is a truck driver in Barcelona in the 70s and with two fellow truck drivers. They moved furniture from Barcelona to around Europe in the late 60s and 70s. So they happened to be like accidental tourists. They go around Europe in a moment where Barcelona is a dark, gloomy city where nothing happens culturally, where there's, of course, Franko, it makes it very difficult to live for everyone. And they get to go around Europe with the truck and they get to be in the middle of the demonstrations of students in Paris or they arrive to London and they get to see the swinging London with the hippies. Or they go to Frankfurt and they met, you know, all these immigrants, the Spanish immigrants who were abroad to work mainly for the companies that made cars like Opel, Volkswagen, all these. And they went there and they see all these people. So they become like, you know, like, yeah, accidental tourists. But there is this main character, Gabriel, who is a passive don Juan. He's a guy. He's a guy. A passive don Juan. Yes, that's the thing. He's a guy who doesn't do anything, but he attracts women. He doesn't know why. This happens to us, you know. We're like that, I know. I'm writing from the personal experience. And he attracts and then he has a wife, I would say a girlfriend in Paris, a girlfriend in London and a girlfriend in Frankfurt. And he has a son with the three of them and also one in Barcelona. And he gives them all the same name, Christopher. And this is one of the mysteries of the book. And the reader has to go till the end of the novel to know why. Now, this is, it is very funny, but it's also very, very clever as well. It's like a big sort of European road movie of a road novel. And because you've got the four brothers who are each very interesting, you've got the four women who are very interesting too. They're quite sort of, you've got the stereotypical English woman who's called Sarah, who's a nurse. I think they're all a little bit... A nurse in a ferry, which is, it makes her a bit twist. A bit different, yeah, a bit different. But so, I mean, what do you... I mean, I hate to say it sounds so important, but it's self-important. What are you trying to say with all of this, apart from just, you know, give everybody a good read and have good fun? Well, you said before a word, which is, for me, very important, its identity. I try to talk about personal identity. How everyone tries to shape its own identity through their own lives, and how, you know, this guy who is from Barcelona and who is someone who cannot root, who doesn't like the idea of rooting. This is something that I share with the character. I never feel good at one place. I always want to be in another place. I mean, London, I'm great in London, but I'm sure that tomorrow I will think, oh, I would like to be, I don't know, in Amsterdam. I have never been in Amsterdam. Are you always travelling? I like to travel a lot, and I like to stay in other places. So I guess this idea of not getting rooted to a place, it's good for the main character, and then, after many years, his sons sort of share it, they have the same name, which is like telling them, you're not unique, but they grew up in different places, with different people, with different matters, so they get to have everyone a personality which is shaped in a different way. You can read a passage for us. That would be great. Thank you very much. I'll read from the beginning of the novel, and you have to bear in mind that it's not me who's reading, but the four brothers, they tell the story altogether, so it's a common voice, and in the beginning of the novel, it's the moment where they start getting this voice together. Just also before you do that, I want to say that it's been translated by Julie Walk, and it's published by Short Books, and Short Books are a first publisher for us too, so you're depending on reading from Los Lovage. We have the same memory. Very early, the sun has just come up. The three of us, father, mother and son, are yearning sleepily. Mums made some tea or coffee, and we'd only drink it. We're in the living room, or the kitchen, as still and quiet as statues. Our eyes keep closing. Soon we hear a lorry pull up outside the house and then the deep blast of the horn. Although we've been expecting it, we are startled by the din and suddenly wide awake. The windows rattle. The rocket must have woken up the neighbours. We go out to the street to see our father off. He climbs into the truck, sticks his arm out of the window, and attempts a smile as he waves goodbye. It's clear he feels bad about leaving or not. He's only been with us a couple of days, three at the most. His two mates call out to us from the cabin and wave goodbye too. Time passes in slow motion. The Pegaso sets off, lumbering into the distance as if it doesn't want to leave either. Mum's in her dressing-gone and the tear rolls down her cheek, or maybe not. We, the sons, are in pajamas and slippers. Our feet are freezing. We go inside and get into our beds, which are still slightly warm, but we can't go back to sleep because of all the thoughts buzzing around in our heads. We are three, four, five, seven years old, and we've been through the same scene several times before. We don't know it then, but we've just seen our father for the last time. We have the same memory. The scene we've just described took place about 30 years ago and the story could begin at three different points on the map. No, no, four. The removal track might have been disappearing into the morning mist that enveloped the Cedle Amarna in the north of Paris, leaving behind a row of houses across from a canal that in the dorm light seemed to have been lifted from the pages of a similar novel. Or perhaps the track's engine shattered the clammy silence next to London Fields in the East End, as it headed under the railway bridge to find the main road, leaving out of the metropolis through the motorway, where driving on the left doesn't present the same headache for a continental tracker. Or maybe it was Frankfurt, the eastern part, at one of those blocks they put up in Jacob's Tracey after the war. Paris, London, Frankfurt, three distant places linked by our father driving a track that moved furniture from one side of Europe to the other. There was one more city, the fourth, which was Barcelona. Point of departure and arrival. In this case, the scene takes place without the track and without the other two trackers. One of us, Christofol, with his father and mother. Three people in the poorly lit kitchen on a flat in Ceredaltigra. But here too, the farewell takes place with the same calm he has countered on to the point that it almost seems rehearsed, with the same vague concern that has always worked for him before in other houses and with other families. That expression on the face, striving for composure, but dreaming over with sadness which sipped into all of us. Hours later, the next day or the next will, we look in the mirror while brushing our teeth and see it in our own eyes. A wistful-ness we all recognise. That's why we now have the feeling that our emotions were scattered far and wide and why now, all these years later, our childhood sense of betrayal is multiplied by four. We also like to think of our mothers, the four mothers, as if there were one. Pain not shared but multiplied. Nobody was spared. Certainly not we for sons. What? You don't get it? It's too complicated. Well, this is going to take some explaining. We are four brothers or more accurately half brothers. Sons of one father are four very different mothers. Until about a year ago, we didn't know each other. We didn't even know the others existed scattered around. Our father wanted us to be called Christof, Christof, Christofer and Christofel. If you say the name out loud, Christof, Christof, Christofel, one after another, the four names sound like an irregular Latin declension. Christof, German nominative, was born in October 65, the impossible hair of a European lineage. Christofer, Saxon genitive, came almost two years later, his birth suddenly enlarging and adding colour to the definition of a Londoner's life. The accusative Christof took a little less time, 19 months, and in February 69 was the last to appear. Sorry, it became the direct, February 69 became the direct object of a friend's single mother. Christofel was the last to appear, a case of circumstance completely defined by place, space and time. Why did our father give us the same name? Why was he so single-minded about calling us that, so obstinate that in the end he managed to persuade our mothers to go along with it? Was it perhaps that he didn't want to feel we were one-offs? After all, none of us has brothers or sisters. Once we talked about it with Petroli, who, like Bundor, was a fellow tracker, and he said, no, no, no, no. When he talked about us, he never got us mixed up and knew perfectly well who was who. We tell ourselves that it may be some sort of superstition. Saint Christopher is the patron saint of drivers, and we four sons were like small offerings he left behind in each country. Candles lead to protect him as he travelled around in his track. Petroli, who knew him very well, disagreed, saying he didn't believe in any hereafter, and suggests a more fantastic but equally credible possibility. Maybe he just wanted four of a kind, a winning poker hand in sons. Four aces, he says, one for its suit. And what about that, we ask? He was the wild card. The joker needed to make five of a kind. Life is very short and there's no time. Christopher suddenly starts singing. We let him go on because the words are relevant. It's a Beatles song. We are not going to play a deciding who's going to be George or Paul or Ringo or John. We are the Christopher's. We'll keep this kind of exercise to ourselves and for this business of interrupting a conversation by breaking into a song, this is the first time and the last time we are going to let anyone chime it. Do a solo, okay, Christopher? Without the prior consent of any other three. We are not in a karaoke bar and we need a few rules if we're going to get along. If all four brothers talk at once, it will be pandemonium. And then again, Chris is right. Life is very short and there's no time. Thanks so much. And also, thank you to the Institute of Ramón Lluil as well for nominating this wonderful book. And thank you to the Spanish Embassy as well who will be sponsoring the fantastic reception we've got after this too. For years, we had no entries from Slovenia. Then we had eight in one go. How could we resist? And of course, we want to do our bit to prop up the Slovenes and get them out of the Euro crisis at least culturally. I want to thank all the Slovenian entries, the poetry and the reportage and the novels. They were all very, very good. In the end, we chose this novel here, the German Lottery. It's a brilliant satire, morality tale and political fable. And it's told by a much published very, very popular master storyteller. Welcome to the magnificent Miha Mazzini. Miha, for a small country, again, you seem to produce a lot of writers. Is it like every second person in Slovenia is a writer? I mean, Slovenian society is a very utilitarian society. The thing that one can do, everybody can do. But I do seem to, in the last few years, met quite a few Slovenian writers. Of course, I mean, as it's hard to find a Slovenian book that's not signed, it's hard to find a writer that hasn't written anything yet. I think you have a very healthy book industry as well, too. Yes, yes, of course. State is financing the publishing of the books and buying of the books for the library. So people jump on and off, like in the tall lifts, elevators. But what about the translation? Is there also a lot of money going into translation as well? No. If you are speaking about the state money, if you are speaking about my own money, yes. Your own money goes into translation. So there are not so many translators into English? No, they are hard to find. Now, tell us about your writing. Give people here a bit of background as to what you wrote. A book which made you famous, the In English for Cartier project, 1987, written under Tito, a very different era. You were very popular then, too. You obviously managed to bridge the two. I mean, I was a young student and I was working in Night Shift as a night watchman. And when man is left alone, you know, somewhere, I was a night watchman in the border between Yugoslavia then in Italy. And if you are left alone with nothing to do as a Slovenian, I wrote a novel, of course. I think lots of Czechs did that, too. It's a Slovak scene. That's why East Europeans have written so much, too. Welcome. Were you always writing in Sloven? In the language? Yes. How different is it from Croatian? Serbo-Croatian. A little bit. I mean, actually we grew up in the same country. So Croatian or Serbian books were cheaper. So we learned Serbian Croatian language to buy the books, you know. This book, The German Lottery, was published in Slovenian in 2010. So it's quite a recent novel also in Slovenian. And it's now with us in English. Now, where does it fit in with all the novels and stories and so on that you've written? Is this one of your favourites? Are you happy that this one has been translated? I mean, it fits into so-called my hospital novels, you know. I go for a run and then something happened to my knee or my ankle and so on, you know. And I ask the first thing I ask the doctor at the hospital, how many weeks? And he says three weeks. I said short novel then. I mean, yes. So you wrote this one in? Yes, yes, I was preparing. I did a lot of research for a novel that it took me ten years to write it. It was published last year in Slovenia. But in the middle of the research for that novel, something went wrong with my knee. I got three weeks. I didn't have time to write that one. The big novel. But so that is three, you know. This is, again, it reminds me a little bit of Jakobs. It's such a brilliant idea for a novel, this one. It's called the German Lottery and it's, obviously, it's a massive metaphor. But you're going back in time to, you've got this, again, this guy in the 70s. He's looking back on his life in this Yugoslav village in the 1950s. Yes, this is something, I mean, I want to have, this is called an unreliable narrator, yes? Unreliable narrator, absolutely. I mean, I remember when I was a kid reading novels written by Agata Christie, you know? And you have this in the end, this detective tells you, now listen, this and this, this happened. And you go, oh my god, it's true, it's true. How I didn't realize it. And even as a kid I said to myself, okay, Micha, when you grow up, you should write a novel like this except the narrator gets it wrong. Totally wrong, everything. He gets it wrong, actually. But Tony, your guy, your young guy, he gets it wrong. He gets it wrong. But boy, do you love him, you know, because he's a naive optimist. Poor Tony. I mean, Tony's, obviously you'd hurt your own niece. You gave him a knee disability. And he can't walk very well, but with great communist logic they made him into a postman. So you obviously enjoy writing about how odd communism was, the eccentricities of communism. Yes, the only way to survive was by laughing at it. So we did actually. But then also this scheme, though, which is funny but much more serious. The idea of the German lottery. So you have Tony, he's going on his rounds. He meets this woman called Zora, who's very beautiful. He helps her rehang her washing line. It's a very romantic story. And he gets involved with her and her husband, Nicolai, the great intellectual, the great man of ideas, who comes and comes up with this scheme, the German lottery. And this scheme is, okay, it's deadly, but when I told, I tested this scheme on my younger daughter and I told her, listen, what if we, and she said, daddy, are we rich? I finished it. So there might be a chance to activate this kind of scheme. Do you think we can do it today? No. It's a very serious idea. It's a story about the greed. I always want to do something about it. Because of all the things we are, I mean all the feelings we have, this greed, we don't have anything. We can't stop greed, except with our reason. And we are not very reasonable creatures. So we are not stopping a lot of greed. And maybe when I finish writing this novel, when I finished the last sentence, and then it was late in the night, and I went to the website to check the news. And the main news of the day was that some American bank called Lemon Brothers collapsed. Exactly. It's brilliant today, it can work in any time. But the more serious point about this, which I think is terribly important to mention before you read, is that they devised this lottery to compensate people who had suffered under the Nazis. And so what Nicolai and Zora and the Postman were going to do was to come up with lottery tickets, and everybody would win. Everybody who had suffered under the Nazis, so it has a really serious message. I know you're laughing, but I do think it's a terribly important part of the book. But everybody wins, and then, of course, it becomes a very elaborate hoax and gets completely out of hand because, as you say, of greed and all the other dreadful things that human beings are capable of. Yes, but everybody that gets the lottery ticket doesn't actually need it. No, that's true. In the end, they risk their lives to get it, and they don't need it. It's about greed. It's about political corruption and so many other really important issues in this very small novel. You're going to read a little bit for us? Okay, yes. Now the Postman is delivering first. I mean later. There will be some rough cuts because I had to cut it because of the six minutes. Or less. And because I wanted to live out the juicy parts for the readers. It's very difficult. She was hanging the washing when I came limping around the corner. She was scantily dressed again. Perhaps the dress was handed down to her or she got it from the United Nations aid package because it only reached her knees. That day was cool and windy, her legs were bare and she was standing on a food stall to reach the lion's trunk across the terrace. I said hello by the book and asked for proof of identity. She gave me a surprised look as if to say, am I not the same as yesterday? I explained the rules are there to be obeyed. All right, she said and stepped down from the food stall. But she must have leaned on the lion too much while doing it because it came undone and she only just managed to grab it. Help, hold it. I took the lion but most of the washing already folded along the ground. Pull it up, pull it up. I lifted my arms high up and the washing started flapping again. She brought her hands before her mouth. Thank you. You spared me from doing the washing again in that icy creek. My arms started to shake. Comrade, please, could you fasten the lion? Of course, of course. She grabbed the free ant and wanted to pull it to the hook around which it had been fastened before. Come closer. I took a few steps so I stood right next to her. She quickly made a knot but couldn't reach to put it over the hook. Closer, closer. I was pushing closer and closer to her but it didn't help. She quickly went to get the food stall. Now we were face-to-face. My arms started jerking and going numb from the strain. She stopped right before my face as if she had just noticed something. How strong you are. She whispered and I felt her breath on my skin. It smelled of coffee, real coffee, not chicory. And then there was that strange head of sand perfume which made me dizzy so I started to breathe heavily. We kept pressing and pressing against each other but we still couldn't reach the hook. My hands became shaky, the bag was still quite heavy. My knees started playing up, sweat began trickling down my back. I felt it between my shoulder blades. She placed her arms around my neck, turned me around and tried to fasten the line to the hook leaning over me. She wasn't very good at it but it wasn't the right moment to point that out. Some women just aren't cut out for something but they offended if you mention it. I had her effort, she leaned on me with all her weight and I really couldn't bear it anymore. I yelled that she screamed and the washing swish down again. I quickly got up and held it up. The bag, come on, let me take your bag. She tried to pick it up by the strap but she couldn't so she got up on the footstool again on tiptoe and then she tried to lift the strap slowly over my head. She was also sweating under her armpits. I saw a drop trickle into her cleavage and the tips of her bra were rubbing through that flimsy dress against the heavy cloths of my uniform. She lifted the strap as much as she could. I had to bow my head and found myself in a cleavage. What a wonderful scent! I kept out and in my mouth gasping. She moved away. The cold air did me good. She stood before me with the bag which was too heavy for her dragging it along the ground. Comrade, be careful with the bag. Yes, of course, she put it on the table and got back on the footstool. Again she leaned over me, again a brisk heavy from the perfume I'm embarrassed to say. I had to remind myself I was a state official in duty. I was filled with strange emotions. Not that I've never had those kinds of feelings before but these times they were so strong and powerful I was becoming afraid of myself. My eyes were doubting, darting, flitting, searching for anything to turn to while my body was trapped in her domain. I tried thinking about the bag wondering if it was safe. I watched it on the table. Was it just as full as before? Did somebody pinch a letter from it? A lost letter, a postman, greatest nightmare. That was all I thought about and about the coat of practice. I kept saying it silently like a prayer, like Hail Mary's and Lord's Prayer's saying she was a customer and an official delivering registered mail. The procedure might have got a little out of hand but everything would soon be back to normal. I just had to hold out. It felt like eternity. She was trying but clumsy as she was. It took her forever until she finally managed to slip the line on the hook and rescue the washing. We were facing each other completely soaked. Thank you. I know that the comrade, a postman is always ready to help. That's nice to hear. I straightened my uniform and put the bag over my shoulder. They come around in the evenings too. No, I deliver it only in the mornings but if you drop off the mail in Mailbox by 7pm it's collected the same day except on Saturdays when you have to drop it by 1pm. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was the German Lottery. It was read by Miha Madseni. I want to say it was translated by Ushka Tsupanec and it was published by CB Editions and nominated by Bellatrina Academic Press and all for the first time here at European Literature Night. It's fantastic. Earlier this year when the snow lay thick and even on the ground I was artistic director of a week-long literature road show through England called High Impact. We travelled to six cities with six top writers from the Low Countries from Belgium and the Netherlands. Tonight I'm delighted to introduce you to two writers from the Low Countries who are not free to participate then but were selected by the judges for ELN because they are just that high impact. First, from Belgium, welcome to Elvin Mortier. For a very long time I've been a fan of Elvin's writing, his novels and several have been published already in English by Harville originally and in German and I've read Götyschlaff in German as well. But now Pushkin Press has taken on the task of republishing all the titles in English which is fantastic. And two future ones as well, so seven in all. They've locked you in. They've committed. That's brilliant. Now they're starting off though with Marcel my debut, your first novel. Fourteen years ago. Amazing. Now again, one of the other writers also was looking back at his first novel from a long time ago. How do you feel when you look back at Marcel now as of almost fifteen years after it was first published? Do you still like it? I took it out of my library two weeks ago and when I read it I thought well that guy can write you know. You did like it? Yeah, I did like it. I still like it. It wasn't in any way embarrassing to think oh I rewrite that sentence. Oh no, it's the book that almost overnight changed my life. It was published and the Belgian and the Dutch press almost exploded with joy and so it came out. I remember it was 25th February of 1999 and before that date I was a rather dusty scientific assistant in a giant museum. You worked in a museum of psychiatry? Yes, for the history of psychiatry. It's all interesting fodder for books. You studied art history too, didn't you? And archaeology, yes. I actually look back at some of the original reviews too from this book. It's all true and people were amazed. Where has this guy come from? It must have been a fantastic opening for you, a launch for you. Yes, it took a while to get adjusted to it. Because for the first two weeks I remember my husband and I were sometimes having breakfast and there was a photographer waiting looking at me and thinking finish your cereals dear, we have to work. And I gave interviews for two weeks and suddenly I was a public figure. How many books have you written since then? I know there's a kind of trilogy. I'm now writing my seventh novel and I've also written three collections of poetry and essays and some theatrical texts as well. You're quite a serious writer. Of course I am. That's what I like about it. It's very, very difficult when you know a writer and with you I do know your writing and we're just lucky not to have just had one published in English. And to be able to sum up with somebody sitting here and to try to tell you to convey to you how beautiful this writing is and the stories and I know that you have certain themes that you always go back to. You're very visual, you write a lot about photography. Shutter Speed was the second novel, I think that's the third novel. And you wrote about photography and filmmaking in that. So it's very important for you how people see things. The Wars, you write about the First World War, the Second World War. Also translated, I've just published last week my translation of the last novel of Virginia Woolf and I've also translated three other writings by war nurses. So I'm hoping your Majesties are going to OBE me soon. Are we allowed to do that? Give or give or give. How do you do it all, basically? You must be writing all the time, you translate as you say and you're writing poetry and novels. I remember writing since I was 11, you know. And when my debut came out it was apart from meeting my beloved husband. It's been the greatest joy of my life. I think still is a source of profound happiness to me. I don't like writers who say they have a career. They should be shot at down. Because if you discover you have a talent it is a privilege and it is also a kind of vocation. You have to be true to it and to develop it. That's for me a source of immense joy. Let's go back in time and look at Marcel and tell people a little bit about this novel. Do you want to give the synopsis or shall I? I know that normally people don't like to do it. But as you say this is your first novel and I'll just read a very quick synopsis so you can do the interesting stuff and talk about what it all means. You've got a 10-year-old boy and he lives with his grandparents in a Flemish village. His grandmother guards the family dead. These are basically photographs in the cabinet. With fierce determination she keeps arranging and rearranging these photographs. She's probably the most important character in many ways. And they are marked in this cabinet by their proximity to a statue of the Virgin Mary. But there's one photograph, one image next to the Virgin Mary and this is of a boy called Marcel who died far too young and for whom there's no grave. So the story is about how he died. I think about having to live with painful truths and with shame and with historical trauma and how in my case it's quite autobiographical in the sense that one of my great uncles died as a German soldier or a Flemish soldier in the German army in Russia. And it's about how to live with that shame and to live with secrecy and silence and whole spoken truths and that was the interesting thing for me as a writer to recreate the atmosphere I had felt as a young child. It's maybe not the task of literature to give answers but to make audible and tangible the complexity of what it is to be a human being and to make choices that can be very terrible. Because this young boy discovers by taking this photograph to his school his teacher who he adores tells him that one of the little images on this photograph is a swastika. The boy thinks it's an eagle carrying a clock, you know. But Mrs Fegard, as the teacher, is called that it's not a clock, it's a swastika. Actually, the little boy doesn't understand he thinks a swastika is a kind of animal he doesn't know yet. That in a kind reflects the way a lot of stories or silences just pours into me as a child and in a sense being immersed in a history I couldn't understand yet at the time. You give such a vivid portrait of rural Flanders, Belgium at the time as well and of course the repercussions of post-war in that particular part of the world as well. Now we're going to hear a reading from this wonderful book and it's going to be read by Shamila Bezmun. Thank you, Shamila. I'm just going to tell you very quickly it will be published soon by Pushkin Press and it's been translated by Ina Rhylca. Just to add it's available for pre-order on the Speaking Volumes website. This is from the very start of the novel. The house looked like all the others on the road sagging slightly after two centuries of habitation driving winds and war. Behind the hedge a spine of roof tiles slumped between two gables. The window sat a little tipsily in the walls wooden clogs potted with petunias hung by the door. Most of the rooms harbored a limbo of darkness cool in summer, chilly in winter. In summer the walls had absorbed the smell of generations of cooked dinners as in the kitchen where grease clung to the rafters. The cellar stored the attic forgot. By the end of August the cold began to rise from the floors. At night there was a smell of frost in the air Sometimes before a downpour the clouds skimmed so low over the roof that they seemed to be torn asunder by the finial. The light grew thin. The grass in the orchard sparkled until well after midday. The garden shrugged off its last lingering touches of colour and assumed the same grey shade as the gravestones in the churchyard nearby. I was taken there once a year by the grandmother but she herself was a daily visitor. It was less than five turnings between the garden gate and the place where her dead lay sleeping. She did not hold with buying flowers for all souls day. There are always daisies pushing up from the graves. They would do well enough, she thought. Tombstone plarks decorated with porcelain roses filled her with scorn. She had epitaphs of her own carved in the granite of her soul. She was the unbending midwife of her tribe. She would not allow her dead to vanish unattended. Once they were buried their bodies became earth. She raked partings in their hair and clipped the bushes by their headstones as if they were fingernails. Wedding rings had been transferred from the cold fingers of the dead to those of the warm-blooded living. She had folded their spectacles and laid them in a drawer where they joined the tangle of all the other pairs with their long grasshopper legs. After each funeral she would open the curtains in the back room, raise the roller blind and put fresh sheets on the bed. The time will come for each and every one of us, she would say, turning back the covers. Into bed with you, no dawdling now. The chapel of rest had become a guest room again. The alarm clock on the bedside table ground the seconds away. The fluorescent green face glowed spectrally in the dark. I hardly dared move between the sheets for fear of rousing the lost souls in the bedsprings which jangled accusingly at the slightest movement of my limbs. The house was a temporary annex to heaven due to a shortage of space. Within the confines of the glass-fronted cabinet the dead faded less rapidly than the living whose austerely-framed portraits hung unprotected on the walls of the parlour. They were not swathed in garlands of guilt or rubins of silver, nor were they as conscientiously cherished. All Souls Day came four times a month at the grandmother's house. First she whisked her duster over the statue of the Virgin Mary and the miniature tower commemorating the Flemish soldiers killed in the Great War. Then she instructed me to hand her the photographs one by one, not randomly, but in the order in which they had left their realm. They piled up. A young generation had arisen, the old one was gently falling away. In the end there were more photographs than I could hold. I laid them on the table in the proper sequence and patiently slid them over one at a time to be put back in the cabinet. In their ornate frames they looked like fragile carriages lining up to go through customs. The grandmother blessed them with her duster and told me all their names. Clutches of aunts, nephews, distant cousins, nieces came up for review. Most of them were unknown to me aside from a picture and a terminal disease. Four times a month I would listen to her reel off the same causes of death pausing now and then to give a little sniff of resignation. Bertrand was one of the few I had actually met. My first dead body. Someone had to be the first and I could have done worse. One sunny Friday afternoon I came upon him quite rigid, hunched over the table in the low ceilinged back kitchen of his tumble down home. His hand was reaching for his inhaler. Asma, the grandmother declared. His lungs wheezed out so loud you could hear it in the street. His daughter could barely wait to flog his antiques, tear the old house down and build a villa with a swimming pool. The grandmother took a dim view of this. She never even lifted a finger for him. A hint of malice entered her voice for the daughter's gleeful anticipation of her riches had been short-lived. Popped her clogs before the week was out. A burst appendix it seems after eating a boiled egg with a piece of eggshell on it. She was bent double with pain. Too mean to call a doctor though. Bertrand's daughter was relegated to the darkest corner of the shelf. No one was given any old place in the cramped afterlife of the cabinet which was shared with the wine glasses and a coffee service. There was hell, paradise and purgatory. Aside from a few blessed souls who had special claims to proximity to the virgin, no one could count on a fixed ranking. Posthumous promotion could happen but being taken down a peg or two was more likely. One day Bertrand too found himself in purgatory. Second row behind the virgin's back. News had reached the grandmother of some sin he had committed. It seems he beat his wife. When I asked her why she went quiet. Indeed lad she sighed at last why would anyone do such a thing? She was given to remarks like that. Well my dear Morris they won't be back, that's for sure she would sigh. Morris ran a draper's shop in town which she visited every few weeks. She always phoned first saying Morris I need some margin dies I'm coming to see you. He would be waiting in the doorway for her to arrive. A short man, bald but for a few tufts around the ears with a lumpy red nose over a pencil moustache. The shop window bore the name and now it's textiles elegantly scripted in white paint. Getting himself worked up for one of his Italian welcomes no doubt the grandmother would hiss between her teeth as we rounded the corner. She was seldom mistaken. As soon as he spotted us Morris rushed forward fflapping his arms and rubbing his hands together. He seized the grandmother's shoulders and kissed her loudly three times. Whenever Andrea calls he rejoiced it makes my day. That will do Morris. She glanced round to make sure there weren't too many people watching. I'm not the queen you know. Thank you Shamela and Irwin. We are running a little bit over but we did start late as well and I'm really sorry about that but you must stay around because we've got two amazing writers still to go. Before, very very briefly before I bring on the second high impact writer. I want to say how much I've been looking forward to him particularly interviewing particularly because finally I've got somebody I can talk to about fashion because I've heard that he's actually a shoe fanatic. Welcome to Frank Westerman from the Netherlands. Not very exciting shoes tonight. Somebody told me about this. Is it true? I thought that question came because you are a shoe fanatic. No, I was hoping. I've worn them for you basically. But some questions tell more about yourself this day. Go on, ask me anything then. What about a colour red? That's an interesting one. It's definitely my favourite colour. But it is true isn't it? You love shoes and you love fashion and so on too. It's kind of nice for me to find somebody who does amongst writers. Not many writers do. But just so that people don't think I'm trivialising what you do. This is a really great writer. A great journalist, a correspondent and has been all over the world. And you have written five, six books. I'm working on number eight. You're working on number eight, so in that case seven books. But five of them have been translated into English or six. Well, three. I've got quite a long list here. I do love sailing boats. You love sailing boats? No, I'm just kidding. So how would you describe it? Basically it's non-fiction. It's contemporary history. It's journalism. Sorry to stop you at this. It's not an act. Please do not take this personally. I don't like the label non-fiction. Tell me what you do. There are stories, but they are true. It's like you have the genre of crime, crime stories. And then you also have true crime. It's even more. I wouldn't say better, but it's if you call it non-fiction, I don't want to be labelled by what I'm doing not. You see? You've travelled as a journalist. You've travelled an awful lot, and you experienced an awful lot. You were in Yugoslavia and Srebrenica and so on too. You experienced a lot, which even though I imagine it was very difficult, it was good material, as journalists will often say. Is that how you see, did you travel in order to write, or did you write after you travelled? How did that come about? When I travel, I do travel, but not a lot, I think. I go to places and I register or I try to participate a bit, so I do observe what happens. But the real travelling occurs, I think, when you write. Even through stories. Because you swallow it again, your experiences, you have to give words to it. And the only tool you have is the language. So how do you represent what you have seen or experienced? You have only a limited amount of tools, like your imagination, which is not switched off if you do non-fiction. It's timing, it's style, it's the sound of the vowels, so that's an all different experience. I think that's the real travelling. Going to places is one thing, but then trying to write about is quite another. So what is the origin of Brother Mendel's Perfect Horse? The origin, yeah. Right, I mean this is, you could interpret it as a book about Hannah Horses. You could interpret it as a history of Europe. You could interpret it as your story through looking at different breeding programmes. I mean, what for you was the starting point of this book? Well, they're beautiful horses. I love these horses and I used to ride as a child till I was 16, 17, almost every day. But that's, well, yeah, that's important, but that's not the real starting point of the book. Actually, I think that a few things came together while the Lippithanders, they are famous from they call it dancing, classical music, Spanish writing school, the Habsburg Empire, they're still there, they're still living, they're living in the Hofburg in Vienna. That's all the folklore, the fairy tale, it's real, but it's also a story. And then I thought like what if I write a family chronicle basically of the horse that I had known as a child, there was the price horse, stallion of the stables the writing school where I was writing and write a family chronicle of the 20th century of Europe by just following the fate of four generations of stallions that were famous where at the eye of the hurricanes of the wars I try to follow that line but they're not subjects, they're objects. I don't make them speak or command on history but it's like the first question at the beginning of our talk that we we were trying to say trying to find common ground or whatever what we do and see in Dupitanaer horses tells pretty much about who we are what we see in it is racial purity, it's a bastard it was created from scratch from different breeds of horses 400 years ago a horse that had to carry the emperor but it started off as a bastard and we call it a racial pure horse. So this tells more about us than about the poor Dupitanaer and this is what I try to do everywhere these horses are in a way the prism through which I try to look at the mirror to look at ourselves there's some I mean it is I'm not interested in horses at all but you ride them that's what's so amazing for me about this book and again we all felt the same way about it the fact that this is a book about horses but it's written like a page turning novel because it's a history story and I kept reading out passages to my husband saying did you know that there were only six breeds or six pure lines of Dupitanaer? It is an amazing story but what do you tell also about the Nazi breeding programmes these are really extraordinary so I didn't know any of that I didn't know that Auschwitz had a stud farm amazing stories you did a lot of research for this you travelled a lot I did but it's also the way how you look at it because I've one example of this Nazi scheme of creating and enhancing people creating a better breed of superhumans this is a text school book the 30s biology for school children and it has this thing in the background it's called you have to put your name and your parents, grandparents but also the colour of your hair the colour of your skin et cetera it was actually copied from what a Dupitanaer horse has, it's a pedigre pedigre it's the same an ancestor, a table of ancestry and it's the same format so the horses name and the parents of the horse the great grandparents the pedigre is the main document for a pure bred horse to have and I think there are many similarities now there is a documentary maker who wants to make a documentary and he comes back to me but where in the history books I see the connection between Nazi Germany and other horses I cannot find it beyond your book I pointed these kind of similarities I don't make them up but I try to highlight them they're not necessarily in other text books or in other history books I was looking for these kind of stories that are true but at the same time probably not imagined before I must say it's a great contribution to history it's really eye-opening gobsmacking you're going to read a passage for us from this book brother Mendel again it's one of these like a crossword clue isn't it who is brother Mendel brother Mendel was called the father of genetics father of genetics researched among 12,835 crossing experiments and then he had the clue this is something light just an encounter with a man who becomes a character in the book or character, a real person at the center of the ring that was the world of Lipitsaners stood a Viennese hypothesis named Hans Bravanets he knew their individual paces he did not own a computer the bloodlines of 5,000 horses were stored in his brain her Bravanets could be found in the Vienna phone directory listed as certified horse breeding professional placing back and forth before the windows of my office I practiced three German sentences then I punched in the number and explained to Bravanets the R dark and rolling who I was and why I hoped to speak to him I also told him that I would be coming to Vienna that we can to visit the Spanish riding school he said the royal Spanish riding school I corrected myself before you go any further do you mind my asking your age I did it between repeating my correct name or stating my age 42 I said at last haha, I'm twice as old as you I'm 84 after congratulating him on his seniority I started talking about the Lipitsaners what intrigued me most was the idea of their nobility a human-bred animal that resided on the top rung of racial enhancement if anybody could tell me about the background of this imperial horse he could at his age Bravanets said the world around him no longer proceeded at such a clip if I would go to the trouble of writing a letter he would reply was in two weeks but before that may I ask what it is that you want from me I started by describing Conversano Primula that's the famous horse from my youth and his ancestors who Pete had told me included famous stallions that had performed in Vienna he listened for a minute then asked have you ever been a soldier I had to admit I hadn't then it's going to be difficult if you've never served in the army how can I explain these things to you I've been in wars I said the Balkans and the Caucasus ah, ich auch I heard him say also in the Balkans almost in the Caucasus we landed in the Crimea 42 but we never got any further than Kerch Peninsula he paused then asked Gavarici pa ruski I replied in Russian Brabenets growled I used to speak it you see I spent two and a half years as a Soviet prisoner of war we learned Armee Russis but you know what if you call me on Sunday once you get to Vienna I'll let you know whether I can receive you on Monday just one bit I met him and he invited me on a trip to the stud farm Lipica it's on the border between Slovenia and Italia today where 400 years it was the birthplace of the Lipicana breed and we were together with friends of the Spanish riding school throwing the Spanish off-ride school old Austrians I mean the people that I was with still think that the emperor is still there in Vienna and we came to see young stallions there out in the fields the red tractor had almost disappeared where someone shouted here they come at first I couldn't see anything the hilly landscape was greyish green with grey spots the sky above a light blue somewhere on the horizon amid this pellet a dark serpent was twining along 70 young stallions coming down to the slope at a gallop I saw a swell of horses bodies moving forward in waves and heaves sometimes the ribbon disappeared into a fault in the landscape and was lost from sight for 30 seconds or more one never knew when the stallions would reappear but when they did they were suddenly much closer soon you could make out the individual animal and feel the earth tremble I stepped to one side from where we had gathered in the coral directly in front of the open barn doors the others remained where they were I divided my attention between the unrushing herd with their flattened ears and their joyous faces and the joyous faces of Frau Brabenets and Frau Bachingen who stood watching arm in arm the horses shot through the funnel-shaped fences of the coral without slowing in the final straight they accelerated to a sprint with where I was the finish line never before I had witnessed so many horses racing towards me simultaneously their hooves flung and sand bubbles from the ground the noise they made was not a ruffle not a stamping but a wall of sound the ladies from Vienna apparently had no intention of moving aside I had flattened myself against the white wooden fence just as I was about to scramble over it I heard a wild whinnying looking up I saw the animals come screeching to a halt as they were on command amid a cloud of dust at an arm length from Frau Bachingen and Frau Brabenets their handbag still slung over one shoulder the ladies promptly began patting the greys like blue ribbon winners the coral had been transformed into chaos of humans and animals but what did it matter stallions that nibbled at shawls and hairdos were barely reprimanded Hans Brabenets stood in the midst of it all his chin held high bravo a lady said in her head shouted to the horses like an opera lover shearing her favourite tenor Dream writing and a dream translation by Sam Garrett too whose work we had quite a lot of on the high impact tour it's been published Brother Mendel's perfect horse has been published by Harville Secker and as you hear written by Frank Westerman now Frank and my next guest probably have a little bit in common because you've been to I mean you've written about Mount Ararat I think as well too and our final guest is a journalist and she's a remarkable woman who I met last year at the Hay Festival and was completely bowled over by her she's from Turkey and she's written widely on Turkey and Armenia and on many many other issues she's won the Pen for Peace Award and she's the journalist of the year she's brave and she's brilliant Eche Timelcaron Thanks to you they should establish a new category in Film Festival like chair doors we can talk about fashion too very nice dress on new haircut since I last saw you hey but um we're going to talk definitely not just to say I can do it with women as well very very quick get this out in the open Turkey at European Literature Night good bad how do you feel I feel European as much as a Beiruti who does contemporary art or Egyptian who is on Tahrir Square or student university student who is in a demonstration and who has been pepper gas let's say I think the concept of Europe should be redefined and I think we need a new concept something like Andalusia reloaded because yeah because the the experiences in those squares like Tahrir, Kaspa Madrid Athens and so on I think they should be all combined and we should come to a new definition of Europe because all those people somehow by soul or by I don't know by visual thinking maybe they want to live like a European in a way not completely in a way and the fact that we've included Turkey in European Literature Night that's perfectly normal and something that you would not question for a moment come again I'm sorry and the fact that we've included Turkey in European Literature Night I mean for me absolutely no problem at all anybody else thinks it's an issue but some people do in question why have we included Turkey in our elementary schools did I tell you this before because this is a story that I told all the time because it tells a lot I think in our elementary schools there were these maps which showed Turkey as the biggest country in the world and on the left upper side it was Europe a little bit very lively all colourful and everything and on the this side down it's like a desert like Iraq, Iran and no cities dirty Arabs desert and camels so it was like the establishment was telling you to go there to Europe whereas this part of the world is not for you so now it's changing with the new government and everything and now we're having these new maps with more detailed Middle East less Europe and so on and so forth so Turkey's changing and well actually I wouldn't consider myself European I would consider myself Middle Eastern and that would again make most of the people angry in Turkey as well because they're like quite confused they want to be European they want to keep their roots with the Middle East they want to be healthy in the cyclotrophrenic situation in a way Are these still good questions to ask or are you a bit tired of these questions now? I'm very tired that's why I'm doing this memorise Let's move on I'm very good at it though Talking politics is so so easy But you know what's interesting for me is since we also asked and you're particularly well known for your journalism Lately novels are becoming more famous than my journalism But that's what I wanted to ask you is why you've made after 20 years being better known for your your politics and so on and quite controversially because you've written about the Armenian diaspora and the Kurds and about women's issues you put yourself at risk you've had a difficult life it's not been easy and now you've turned with great love to literature Have you left the journalism behind? Two reasons I think Firstly I come from literature anyway My first books were Poem and prose which I think opera of literature and the second reason I think fiction is more influential has more impact on people My journalism unfortunately couldn't change anything in my country but I have a bread tree in Beirut I really love to tell about this little story You have a bread tree? In my previous novel Sounds of Bananas it takes place partly in Beirut and I created this character called Zeynab Hanem and she's a former leftist she wants to help the poor people but she hates them she is disgusted by poor so she comes up with this idea she puts leftover breads in a bag and she hangs them on the tree and the whole neighborhood who wants to help the poor but they are disgusted by the poor they follow the idea and there are bread trees in the certain street of Zeynab Hanem so everybody, most of the people who read the book they wanted to go to Beirut and with book in their hands they started looking for this bread tree and then it was okay until at some point and then I went to Beirut and I met some people who started thinking that there is a bread tree in Beirut that only they don't know so I think I created this bread tree which everybody, some of the people even in Beirut think that it still exists but they didn't see them so my journalism is so weak comparing to this example it's fascinating because in a way you're dismissing so much of what you've done which was very important journalism I feel sad in a way that you feel that you didn't have an impact I think the literature is wonderful and the reason we talk less about it is because so little has been translated we have some extracts from Sounds of Bananas and I need to read from that as well that would make a huge bit of difference if we have more Shala, if there are publishers out there this is a wonderful writer and please publish these books, these novels in English well there are good publishers who are interested but we couldn't decide yet this is what my agent told us I'm taking 10% well I'm writing about that part of the world and that part of the world if you're coming from that part of the world under the belly you're expected to tell about certain things in a certain way so issues and problems and you are expected to talk about your country's problems with a woman's eye and stuff and I'm not talking about my country when I am doing literature I'm talking about Arab countries mostly Sounds of Bananas I wrote in Beirut for a year the last book women who blow on nuts I wrote it in Tunisia and I lived there for a while so the main idea is to talk about these people not as Arabs not to feed that pornographic curiosity of the western audience because overall all in all we as writers of the world we are working for this industry where the main target is the American Housewives no seriously because the best-selling lists are made according to supermarket sales and supermarket sales are for American Housewives so we are entitled to reduce our stories very complicated stories for American Housewives who don't know where our countries are so if there is an American Housewife in this audience I'm leaving her aside so yeah and this reducing the story is the main issue of literature when you're coming from not from London let's say not from western society and I think literature is a better way to deal with this expectation than journalism because when you're a journalist you're expected to be the internationally suffering third world person because you have to talk about how you're oppressed how you're censored how you are dealing with dangers and so on and you have talked about all those things too yeah unfortunately I did now I'm really bored of that and I'm trying to do this literature without reducing the stories of the people who are living under belly of the world I'm really happy to focus on your literature and from the extracts I've read of sounds of bananas which is about, as you say about Beirut it's about sounds of this amazing city it's a love story there are two and a half love stories two and a half so many as you can you're going to read an extract for us this is a letter from Shatila camp just before the Sabra Shatila massacre and Dr Hamza writes this letter to his daughter and she calls her Kebe Kebe is a little meatball and he thinks Dr Hamza thinks that Filipina, his daughter looks like a Kebe when she's a baby July 15 1982 Shatila camp Filipina, my sweet Kebe we fall in love with a person when we see in them a doorway to another life it is neither happiness nor pain that draws us to them what we call love is this a person sees in another an unearthly house I saw in your mother just such a doorway just such a house my name is Hamza in Shatila camp I'm known as Dr Hamza but don't let my name fool you I was always a small man as she rolled up breast bone as for your mother she looked like she was tossed from her mother's body before she had a chance to grow it seems people love those whose wounds fit into their own the commandos who brought your mother here had asked me Dr Hamza, what should we do with this girl? your mother was snorling a man should know when to keep his distance from a woman I do I've learned there are times when only other women should touch a woman that's why I called the women over and they called other women they wove a web of whispers around your mother passing her from one woman to the next they use their hands to walk roll, wheel and fly her away first they washed her they untangled her hair which was sticky and clumped together with blood foaming their hands with olive oil soap they rubbed the foam all across her chest washing her as they would a child they got water and poured it over her in a language she didn't understand they pitied her loved her and made her smile they let her through the doorway of another life by pouring buckets of water over her together they turned your mother back into a full blossomed woman they called her back to life your mother was like a pebble at first the type of pebble no one in the camp had seen before she had gone completely still even her blood had gone still women know how to deal with this kind of thing warming the blood with their hands they can make it flow again women don't learn how to do this they're born with this knowledge in the palms of their hands that's why little girls are always looking for something to take care of then they combed her hair I think women heal each other through their hair, Filipina focusing on each strand on each tip they formed a circle of healing I watched them comb your mother's long black hair holding it and untangling it as though they were brushing all out her thoughts maybe that's why throughout history women who wanted to destroy other women start by cutting off their hair they know that a hairless woman has nothing to hold on to and therefore can thrive they gave her the soap-sentent black pants and yellow sweater of a young girl who'd recently died the pants hung loose around her thighs and the sweater was too long and one side and too short on the other but that day I realized that there is no place more kissable on a woman than her wet hair newly combed and shiny from being washed falling on either side of her face I also realized that day for the first time how tired I was of the war which I'd witnessed through the thousands of patients passing through my clinic it's in hospitals that one truly understands war, Filipina the hospital is the front not of fighting men but of men who've lost not of men, but of the vestiges of men it's a tragic sight because no one is fighting anymore it's not the wounds or the blood it's not even the helplessness or the incisions administered without painkillers men who've given up on fighting are much scarier than fighters their nakedness their barefoot-knitness and the nightmares that haunt them behind closed eyes are what make hospitals the war's scariest fronts it seems to me they'd feel more triumph if they could die in their military fatigues and boots this front, where pain can finally be felt, is the war's bloodiest front you wouldn't want to see it men scream more in this front where everyone is trying to heal than in the one where they're trying to kill each other it was this front's general the men under my command were missing an arm or a leg when the next day your mother stood in the doorway of this bizarre battleground and said good morning, I wanted to laugh because, Filipina your mother spoke English just like a Palestinian like us, she'd learned English in order to express herself and like us, she belonged to a people who had never expressed themselves that's why she always looked like a little angry when she spoke English and why she scrolled when she stood in the clinic story that morning and followed her good morning with me with gimme work we troubled peoples don't know the English language subtle, refined and polite words so when we meet someone from a people as troubled as ours who can sympathize when we struggle to fill in the blanks of a strange language with coarse seeming words we have no choice but to love them so much to Ece Tomekaran and that was the sounds of bananas translated by Deniz Perrin and it was nominated by the free word centre in London and they're doing a lot of really important work at the moment with Turkish translation, Turkish literature as you probably know is undergoing a boom at the moment and I do hope that you all read more widely it is, can you believe it the end of the evening we've overrun a little bit but I don't think we have actually overrun and we started late and we've made sure that each writer's had their allocated length of time so thank you so much to everyone congratulations to all the writers to Birgit van der Beker Norbert Gestraen Jakam Tople Jordi Punti Miha Matzini, Irwin Mortier Frank Vesterman and Ece Tomekaran and thank you to all of you so much Foils has just been nominated being awarded National Bookseller of the Year at the Bookseller Industry Awards on Monday so do go out and buy books from Foils and get them signed by the authors and also have a drink on the Spanish Embassy thank you so much to all of you for coming