Tag: contemporary Russian women writers

Russia Beyond’s list of 12 must-read contemporary women writers

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

In anticipation of a Punctured Lines list of notable women writers in translation from Russian, here’s a list by Alexandra Guzeva, published on Russia Beyond* last October. It’s a good list in that it includes many of the women writers who have risen to prominence in the contemporary Russian literary circles. All of these writers have been translated to English, so their work is easily found online or in your local library.

To be a little nit-picky about this list, I do want to argue with the idea that “Russian literature in the 19th and early 20th centuries was an almost exclusively male preserve.” There were plenty of women participating in Russian literature in 19th and early 20th centuries. If it appears to be “an almost exclusively male preserve,” it’s a problem with the way women’s contributions to literature are remembered. We’ve created Punctured Lines blog precisely because we need to work on this perception.

One more nit-picky comment. Calling women “weaker” sex just doesn’t work in 21st century (if it ever did!). Quotation marks don’t help.

https://www.rbth.com/arts/331180-contemporary-russian-women-writers

*) Russia Beyond is a multilingual publication owned by the Rossiya Segodnya, a Russian government state news agency

7 Russian Booker Prize winners and their must-read novels

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

There has been a lot of talk, including on this blog, about literary prizes, translation, and gender imbalance. The Russian Booker Prize is one of the country’s most prestigious awards. The writers in the title have had their winning novels translated into English, and there is also a list of other winners whose novels haven’t been translated but with links to their translated shorter works. Of the seven writers in the title, three are women: Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Kukotsky Enigma (2001, trans. Diane Nemec Ignashev); Olga Slavnikova, 2017 (2006, trans. Marian Schwartz); and Elena Chizhova,The Time of Women (2009, trans. Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas; my review here). But no prizes for guessing whether this relative gender balance holds true for the Russian Booker overall.

https://www.rbth.com/arts/331193-russian-booker-prize-winners

The NOS(E) Award’s 2019 Longlist

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Thank you, as always, to Lisa Hayden of Lizok’s Bookshelf for keeping us all up to date on prize-related announcements. We are happy to share the list here, particularly as it contains her very helpful, and entertaining, descriptions of the nominated works. Less happy is the subject we’ve talked about previously on this blog (and which, in the wake of the Nobel, some of us have debated in a – let’s go with “spirited” – manner on Twitter): of the sixteen titles, only three are by women. While no one in their right mind would suggest that gender should be the sole criterion for anything, really, there is a real issue with Russian literary prizes being overwhelmingly skewed toward male writers (googling the major award winners will confirm this in short order). This is not meant as a slight to any of the men on the list, but it is a question that needs to be asked, over and over, until we arrive at a workable solution: how do we honor good writing whoever the writer may be while at the same time ensure more balanced representation in terms of nominations and winners? Suggestions welcome; perhaps someone can forward them to the Russian prize committees.

http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-nose-awards-2019-longlist.html

Yelena Furman on Ksenia Buksha’s “The Freedom Factory”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“A NOVEL ABOUT a Soviet military factory whose workers must eventually adjust to a post-Soviet way of life does not sound like a thrilling read. Yet there’s a very good reason why Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory (Zavod “Svoboda”) won Russia’s National Bestseller Prize in 2014 (Buksha is only the second of three women to do so since the prize’s founding in 2001) and was also a finalist for the Big Book Award. In the author’s hands, this unpromising raw material is skillfully transformed into a genuinely and unexpectedly compelling narrative.” 

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shintity-fug-these-vulstes-on-ksenia-bukshas-the-freedom-factory

2019 Warwick Prize in Translation, Long List

~ 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)

Olga Zilberbourg: To Understand Russia’s Complexities, Turn to Its Contemporary Literature

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“A FRIEND’S TEN-YEAR-OLD SON son recently came up to me at a party to ask, ‘You’re from Russia, right?’ Sensing caution in my assent, the boy hesitated before asking the next question, clearly trying to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t cause offense but would express his curiosity. He finally came up with, ‘It’s a very violent place, isn’t it?'”

http://epiphanyzine.com/features/understand-russias-complexities?fbclid=IwAR35rzgR1U6dFXsYJM6ueL6nid8S9R6BR0Qr44elOeHnU2HwPtyzVpxJ0RY

Yelena Furman on Elena Chizhova’s “Little Zinnobers”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“The English-language translation of The Time of Women, by Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas, came out in 2012 from Glagoslav Publications, who have now released Chizhova’s earlier novel Little Zinnobers (Kroshki Tsakhes, 2000). Translated by Carol Ermakova, the volume includes a translator’s note and a very useful critical essay by Rosalind Marsh.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/torn-like-a-veil-before-me-on-elena-chizhovas-little-zinnobers/

Yelena Furman on Alisa Ganieva’s “Bride and Groom”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“ALISA GANIEVA’S APPEARANCE in the world of Russian literature took everyone by surprise, in the literal sense. A critic by training, she published her first work of fiction, the novella Salam, Dalgat! (Salam tebe, Dalgat!), when she was 25, under a male pseudonym; when the novella received the Debut Prize in 2009, Ganieva outed herself as a woman at the awards ceremony.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-voice-from-the-caucasus-on-alisa-ganievas-bride-and-groom/

 

Yelena Furman on Elena Chizhova’s “The Time of Women”

~ Yelena Furman ~ 1 Comment

“THE TIME OF WOMEN is Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas’s translation of Elena Chizhova’s 2009 Russian Booker-winning novel Vremia zhenshchin. (Modeled on the Booker Prize in Britain, the Russian Booker is given to the best Russian-language text; Chizhova had been nominated for the award twice before). Set in Chizhova’s native St. Petersburg, mostly in the 1960s, when the city was known as Leningrad, this most beautiful, yet most maddening city emerges as a central focus of the narrative, as it often has in Russian literature, from Gogol to Dostoevsky to Andrey Bely.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/soviet-scars-yelena-furmans-the-time-of-women/