BookBlast® Podcast

Warsaw Tales, BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards Piccadilly

The BookBlast® Translation Book Club meets in person on the second Monday of each month, hosted by Georgia de Chamberet, at Hatchards, Piccadilly, to discuss works of fiction in translation published in the last ten years. Georgia and Hatchards’ booksellers, choose well-written, engaging storytelling to inspire reading for pleasure as well as illuminating cultures from around the world.

Hear our special guest at the October BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, co-editor and translator of Warsaw Tales (OUP 2024). She is best-known for translating Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Hear highlights of Antonia's presentation and illuminating comments from book club members.

Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | A BookBlast® Production

Georgia de Chamberet en conversation avec Simon Bentolila de Lire Magazine (in French)

Pour célébrer la parution du livre 'Une femme, deux hommes Lesley Blanch, Théodore Kommissarzhevsky et Romain Gary' à la Maison de Balzac, Paris, le Mercredi 5 Juin 2024, Simon Bentolila de Lire Magazine a discuté avec Georgia de Chamberet, de la vie et des amours de Lesley Blanch (1904-2007). Femme libre et autonome, artiste complète et grande voyageuse, elle n’en était pas moins totalement dévouée aux deux hommes de sa vie, le dramaturge Théodore Kommissarzhevsky et l’écrivain Romain Gary, dont elle fut le première épouse.

"Il faudrait toujours chercher la femme exceptionnelle qui se cache derrière l'oeuvre d'un grand homme," Journal de Dimanche

A BookBlast® Production 

Sian Williams in conversation with Georgia de Chamberet

Georgia de Chamberet at BookBlast® is delighted to interview Sian Williams, the visionary founder of the Children’s Bookshow. Discover how this much loved and hugely popular national tour of writers and illustrators of children’s literature first began and who will be on tour this autumn.

Michael Rosen: “The Children’s Bookshow takes children’s authors to meet tens of thousands of children, introducing children to how and why writers write, illustrators illustrate. They give children insights into how they too can transform thoughts and feelings into words and pictures. This is not simply a matter of it being enjoyable, it’s a necessary part of what we understand by the word ‘education’.”

Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | A BookBlast® Production

Episode number 47

Abdourahman Waberi in conversation with Georgia de Chamberet

Prize-winning essayist, novelist, poet and academic, Abdourahman Waberi in conversation with Georgia de Chamberet about the events and cultures that have inspired him. Born in 1965 in Djibouti, he left his homeland for France in 1985 where he studied English at the University of Caen. He did a degree in English at the University of Dijon where he wrote a thesis on the work of the Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah. In 2008 he moved to America. Since 2012 he is professor of Francophone literature at George Washington University.

Following on from the release of his first book – a short story collection called Le Pays Sans Ombre, Land Without Shadows – he has had 6 novels, 3 short story anthologies, 3 volumes of poetry and 2 essay collections published, and a great many articles. The recipient of numerous awards, he was recently named one of the “50 Writers of the Future” by LIRE magazine.

Abdourahman Waberi discusses his childhood in a deprived neighbourhood of Djibouti, a pocket-sized but strategically important African nation near the Suez Canal. He remembers the pains of growing up with polio, how he kept strong in the face of merciless bullying at school, and his love of storytelling. He talks about life in France and North America, how writers Annie Ernaux and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o inspire him, and more. So tune in!

 

Produced by BookBlast  

Found in Translation | Fatima Daas discusses literary sensation, The Last One (French & English)

An autobiographical first novel, The Last One tells the story of Fatima and her family. The confusing polarities between different worlds and cultures that are portrayed sparked an intense Media debate in France. Although based on true events and experiences, Fatima Daas changed certain aspects in order to be free to write what she wanted, and convey her feelings about specific events.

 

Tune in to hear a lively conversation with Fatima Daas and podcast host Georgia de Chamberet, about literary inspiration, handling her surprise overnight success, and the pressures directed at women from religion and from society, and more besides The Last One is published in English, by HopeRoad Publishing. The interview is in both French and English.

 

Produced by BookBlast  

Found in Translation | Faïza Guène (author) & Sarah Ardizzone (translator) on Men Don’t Cry

Faïza Guène writes about normal people living in urban tower block estates surrounding cities like Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. Her first novel, Kiffe kiffe demain, published in England under the title Just Like Tomorrow, sold over 400,000 copies when it came out and has been translated into 26 different languages. She was just nineteen.

Tune in to hear her lively conversation with translator of sixteen years, Sarah Ardizzone, and host Georgia de Chamberet, about inner city school life, the impact of Black Lives Matter, the 2024 Olympic Games, translating argot and Arabic-influenced backslang, and all about her latest novel out in English, Men Don’t Cry (Cassava Republic), in which quirky family antics and familial pettiness make for much hilarity: everyone can relate to it.

Produced by Simon James  

Interview with Natasha Lehrer, translator of Consent by Vanessa Springora

Vanessa Springora’s memoir, Consent, became an instant, international literary sensation when it was published in France in January 2020. Her beautifully written, intimate and powerful description of her relationship in the mid-1980s with the French author Gabriel Matzneff, when she was fourteen and he fifty, is a beautifully written universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, resilience and healing.

Translator, Natasha Lehrer, and Georgia de Chamberet, discuss libertarian attitudes and French culture; the trouble with Feminism in France; literary name-and-shame public revelations leading to the downfall of powerful sexual abusers; and more.

Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | Produced by BookBlast®

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Bridging the Divide #15 | Georgian author Beka Adamashvili & Tamar Japaridze on literary satire

As a reminder of what entertaining, inoffensive satire constitutes, pick up a copy of Bestseller by Georgian trailblazer, Beka Adamashvili, deftly translated by Tamar Japaridze, published by Dedalus Books.

A blogger, screenwriter and creative director at an advertising company, Adamashvili’s mischievous sense of humor and deep knowledge of world literature, combined with marketing nous, sharpen his pen. Multiple allusions from literary classics are woven into his postmodern narrative as he sends up digimodernism and the shallowness of the desire for fame. Dante, Conan Doyle, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell and other literary heavyweights rebel against the author. Bestseller pokes fun at literary pretentiousness, humbug and bookish aspirations with wit and verve.

Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | Produced by Rupert Such

Bridging the Divide #14 | Lucy Popescu interviews Goran Vojnović, Olivia Hellewell

"In The Fig Tree, deftly translated by Olivia Hellewell, Goran Vojnović portrays three generations of a family whose lives are marked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its brutal aftermath. It is a remarkable portrait of a country’s fragmentation and a family’s fracture." Lucy Popescu, The BookBlast Diary

Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | Produced by Rupert Such

Bridging the Divide #13 | Lucy Popescu & Natasha Lehrer discuss Nathalie Leger’s The White Dress

In THE WHITE DRESS, Nathalie Léger tells the story of Pippa Bacca, a thirty-three-year-old Italian feminist performance artist who decided to hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem wearing a white wedding dress to symbolise “marriage between different peoples and nations.” Through her intense examination of Bacca’s final work and of the often polarised public reaction to the role of women in art, Léger also compellingly addresses her own conflicted relationship with her elderly mother.

Does Bacca’s work actually need to be translated in a narrative form. Like any visual artist, it’s there in the performative act. Which makes one ask is all communication translation or indeed translatable?

In your view, what makes a good translator and how can translation change perceptions of our world?

Discover the answers to these questions and more, as Lucy Popescu interviews award-winning translator Natasha Lehrer who has translated two of Léger’s books.

Presented by Lucy Popescu | Produced by Rupert Such