Festival Neue Literatur
Festival Neue Literatur's signature translation event returns and pays homage to writers who translate and translators who write. On this very topic, the celebrated novelist and literary translator Idra Novey remarked in an essay entitled
Writing While Translating that, "to begin writing after translating is to begin airborne—suspended between languages—a reckless place I’d like to believe leaves a writer’s mind particularly open to innovation not just with word choice, but with tone and irony and all the other subtle, stylistic aspects that add up to what we call a writer’s voice."
Please join us as we spotlight storytellers who seamlessly move between genres and languages as writers and literary translators, in an exploration of the connections between these forms of writing and how both are inspired, informed, and complicated by occupying a place between languages.
Featuring
Idra Novey,
John Keene, and
Jennifer Croft. Moderated by
Karen Phillips of Words Without Borders.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Festival Neue Literatur, highlighting new literature from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S. The theme of the 2019 festival is
In Memory We Trust, exploring how memory informs, complicates and enriches our imagined futures
. Curated by literary critic, writer and translator,
Liesl Schillinger and
Tim Mohr, celebrated German-language translator and author of
Burning Down the Haus. The renowned U.S. novelist
John Wray will be the chair of Festival Neue Literatur 2019.
Idra Novey is the author of the novels
Those Who Knew and
Ways to Disappear, winner of the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages and she's written for the
New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times, and
New York Magazine. She's translated numerous writers from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector.
John Keene's recent books include the story collection
Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), and several books of poetry. He also has translated the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel
Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014). His recent honors include an American Book Award and Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, as well as a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He chairs the department of African American and African Studies, and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark.
Jennifer Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarczuk’s
Flights. She has also received NEA, Cullman, PEN, Fulbright and MacDowell fellowships and grants, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award and a Tin House Scholarship for her novel
Homesick, originally written in Spanish, forthcoming in English from Unnamed Press in September and in Spanish from Entropía in 2020. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.
Karen M. Phillips serves as executive director at Words Without Borders where she is focused on expanding access to international literature. Prior to joining WWB, Karen worked at the Americas Society, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and as a consultant to cultural organizations in Uganda, Argentina, and Germany. In 2011-12 she was a fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation.
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