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| Now that our first programme announcement has had time to settle, we thought we would look in a little more depth at some of the individual events, beginning with Hassan Blasim & Jonathan Wright in conversation, on the opening night of the festival, Monday 12th May.
Of the group of people involved with the festival, there are two of us who have very strong feelings about previous books from the Blasim/Wright axis. Here are thoughts from Polly Barton (writer & translator) and Tom Robinson (owner of Gloucester Road Books) about past favourites and why this particular event is one to look forward to. |
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| Until now, I’ve desperately avoided the task of explaining what’s so great about God99; instead, I press copies into people’s hands or put them in parcels, and let its compulsive, indefinable magic speak for itself. I’m saying this not just by way of an excuse for the rambling paragraph to come, but because the book’s uncategorisable nature, which sees it elements of epistolary novel, oral history, blog, and autobiography, isn’t incidental to its virtues – rather, it’s precisely this devil-may-care brand of creativity that makes God99 such an exhilarating, mind-expanding read.
Drawing its conceit from the Islamic tradition of God having 99 appellations, God99 looks to a wild and wildly assorted cast of refugees around the world to examine the impact of war, global currents, and prejudice on people’s lives, identities, and emotional landscapes; it combines interviews, blog posts, emails, and narrative passages in a fevered polyphony that questions what authentic expression consists in. Bracing, compassionate, and altogether very rock and roll, God99 is an ever-surprising tour de force, and yet as I was transported to all kinds of places by it, I kept circling back to the single thought: I only wish I could meet this guy… Now, not only am I going to meet him, but so, my friends, could you. I’d strongly advise you not to pass up this opportunity to attend what has the potential to be the literary highlight of 2025.
-Polly Barton |
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| My memory is generally pretty dreadful. In my family it’s my sister who can be trusted with remembering things, so I defer to her whenever possible. When it comes to books, however, I hold onto vast amounts of largely useless information of all kinds that I encounter in my working life – titles, authors, publication dates etc (possibly at the expense of other things I would prefer my mind to hold on to). Books that I’ve read and loved lodge themselves into my mental archives in different ways. Sometimes I retain just a nebulous sense of the book – an atmosphere or a vague notion of what it was that I enjoyed about it. Occasionally a book makes enough of an impact that I remember quite specifically where and when I encountered it. This is the case for The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim, for which I retain a very strong, very visual memory of being half way down the staircase in the bookshop in London where I was working at the time it was published in 2013.
I often talk about the importance of the logic of a short story. Not needing to be maintained for a novel’s duration, a short story can be based on an ostensibly flimsier premise. But this only works if that interior logic can be sustained, it has to be completely bought into. It’s like being pressed by centrifugal force onto the wall of a spinning fairground ride as the floor falls away – it works only while the spinning can be maintained. Blasim does this masterfully well. The descriptions of his stories all sound wild, but as readers we immediately submit to their telling because as a writer he is so deft that we are simply in the world of the story and accept the occurrences without question. We hardly even notice the floor disappearing beneath us.
I am really thrilled that Hassan Blasim is going to be our opening event for this first ever iteration of the festival. He’ll be in conversation with Jonathan Wright, who has now translated all three of Blasim’s books to appear in English and is an award-winning translator in his own right. They will be interviewed by Basma Ghalayini, who is both a translator and an editor at Comma Press specialising in writing from the Middle East. I’m hugely looking forward to hearing not just about Sololand, which is Blasim’s latest book, but also about the relationship between writer & translator, and more broadly about experiences of translating and publishing works from the Middle East into English.
-Tom Robinson |
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