Olga Tokarczuk Wins the Nobel Prize

October 12, 2019October 12, 2019 ~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

The Nobel winners have been announced and Olga Tokarczuk of Poland has won for 2018 (there was no prize given out last year because the Swedish Academy was mired in a sexual assault scandal; with the announcement of the winner for 2019, it quickly became mired in a genocide denial scandal). Tokarczuk is the author of Flights (trans. Jennifer Croft), which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones; both out from Riverhead Books).

You can read Tokarczuk’s statement about receiving the prize here: https://lithub.com/read-olga-tokarczuks-response-to-winning-the-nobel-prize/

And here is an excerpt from Flights: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/fiction/olga-tokarczuk-flights/

2019 Warwick Prize in Translation, Long List

October 10, 2019October 14, 2019 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

We congratulate Lisa Hayden, whose translation of Guzel Yakhina’s novel Zuleikha has been included among thirteen books longlisted for the third annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. We love this book and we are delighted with this news.

Read the full announcement here.

The list of longlisted titles, in alphabetical order, is as follows:

· Brother In Ice by Alicia Kopf, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (And Other Stories, 2018)

· Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta, 2018)

· Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, translated from French by Tina Kover (Europa Editions, 2018)

· Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tocarczuk, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018)

· Katalin Street by Magda Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix (Maclehose Press, 2019)

· Negative of a Dual Photograph by Azita Ghahremann, translated from Farsi by Maura Dooley with Elhum Shakerifar (Bloodaxe, 2018)

· People in the Room by Norah Lange, translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle (And Other Stories, 2018)

· Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Little, Brown Book Group (Corsair), 2018)

· Season of the Shadow by Léonora Miano, translated from French by Gila Walker (Seagull Books, 2018)

· Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, translated from Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas (Peirene, 2018)

· The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018)

· Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig, translated from German by Karen Leeder (Seagull Books, 2018)

· Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina, translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2019)

Zhivago’s great passion inspires plagiarism row | News | The Sunday Times

October 9, 2019October 8, 2019 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a bit of upsetting news. The Sunday Times (paywall) reports that Anna Pasternak, the author of Lara, a biography of Olga Ivinskaya, has accused Lara Prescott of plagiarism. Lara Prescott is the author of the recently published novel The Secrets We Kept that in fictional form follows the story of Olga Ivinskaya. Lara Prescott’s publisher is standing by her, and we will follow the story of the legal complaint as it develops, but I feel that the situation is unfortunate on many levels.

The story of Olga Ivinskaya, who was Boris Pasternak’s partner at the end of his life and through the writing of Doctor Zhivago, continues to fascinate writers and readers of Pasternak’s novel, in particular, for its parallels to that of Lara, the character of Pasternak’s novel. Olga Ivinskaya has told her story herself, in her memoir A Captive of Time that was translated to English by Max Hayward and published by HarperCollins in 1979, and there have been a number of retellings since then (not all of them translated to English).

Penguin Random House pointed out that the story of Olga Ivinskaya has been the subject of multiple books before Anna Pasternak’s, including Ivinskaya’s 1978 autobiography, a book by her daughter Irina Emelyanova, and Peter Finn and Petra Couvee’s 2014 book The Zhivago Affair.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/01/lara-prescott-doctor-zhivago-boris-pasternak-plagiarism-penguin-random-house

One of the reasons I find the legal complaint unfortunate is because it carries on the notes of scandal and sensationalism, associated with Doctor Zhivago from the beginning. I fear that the book and the nuance of the stories of the women behind it get lost in the fray.

On the other hand, given this interest to her story, I do hope that Olga Ivinskaya’s book might see a new English-language edition. And, perhaps, an enterprising English-language writer will take up Zinaida Pasternak’s story. If we’re writing the story of the affair, Zinaida’s side of it is no less captivating than Olga’s.