ALEN MEŠKOVIĆ AND FARUK ŠEHIĆ ARE COMING TO LONDON
Inpress is excited to announce a series of events aiming celebrating translation and discussing the challenges faced by translators and publishers.
IMPOSSIBLE TERRITORY
CELEBRATING TRANSLATION FROM ‘SMALLER’ LANGUAGES
18:00-21:00 – 6TH JUNE 2019 – UCL FESTIVAL OF CULTURES
On 6th June, the Impossible Territory panel series will explore these themes from different perspectives, as part of the UCL Festival of Culture. Join us for an evening of multidisciplinary events celebrating the art of translation with special focus on the so-called ‘small’ languages of Europe, consisting of the following events:
Translating the War: Bosnian writing through English and other languages – bringing together two of the most prolific and best-known Bosnian authors, Faruk Šehić and Alen Mešković, who have written about their war and refugee experience, and experienced translators Christina Pribicevich-Zoric (from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian) and Paul Russell Garrett (from Danish).
Translation Challenge: Hungarian Prose and Verse in English Version – an insight into what translation is, exploring the (im)possibility of translation taking as example translation from Hungarian.
Publishing Translation – Istros Books, Francis Boutle Publishers and MacLehose Press discuss how foreign books are chosen for translation, translated, edited and published, and the challenged faced by publishers of translations.
The full programme of Impossible Territory is available here.
The event is free.UCL Festival of Cultures
18:00 – 21:00 – Masaryk Senior Common Room, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies SSEES
16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW
REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
THE BOSNIAN WAR THROUGH THE LITERARY LENS
18:30 – 7TH JUNE – YUNUS EMRE ENSTITÜSÜ
On 7th June, join us for Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure and Alen Mešković’s Ukulele Jam’s book launch!
More information on the event and the registration link are available here.
The event is free but registration is required.Yunus Emre Enstitüsü
18:30 – 10 Maple Street, London W1T 5HA
Under Pressure is a novel in fragments - brutal and heart-wrenching stories from the frontline by Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić. This book secured his reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region in the post-war period. A war veteran and a poet, Šehić combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader. The book was the winner of the Zoro Verlag Prize, 2004, and its publication has been funded by a super-successful Kickstarter campaign in October 2018.
Faruk Šehić was born in Bihać, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, he studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb. At that point, the then 22-year-old voluntarily joined the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men. After the war he studied literature and has gone on to create his own literary works. Critics have hailed Šehić as the leader of the ‘mangled generation’ of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia, and his books have achieved cult status with readers across the whole region. His third book Under Pressure (Pod pritiskom, 2004) was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His debut novel Quiet Flows the Una (Knjiga o Uni, 2011) received the Meša Selimović Prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011 and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. His most recent books are the collection of poetry entitled My Rivers (Moje rijeke, Buybook, 2014) and Clockwork Stories (Priče sa satnim mehanizmom, Buybook 2018). His books are translated into many languages. Šehić lives in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist.
Ukulele Jam is the story of Miki, a Bosnian teenager, and his family, who are escaping the Balkan war. They live in a Croatian refugee camp, a former holiday resort on the Adriatic, but it’s difficult to adjust to their new circumstances. With the war rumbling in the background and his brother missing in a Serbian prison camp, Miki and his new friends pick up girls, listen to music and have campfire parties on the beach. Then war breaks out between Croats and Bosnians and friends threaten to become enemies. Miki wants to emigrate to Sweden, but his parents can’t face leaving behind their old life in Bosnia. Based on his own experiences, Alen Mešković has written a novel by turns humorous and tragic. It is lively, poetic, raw, affecting and very funny, all the while depicting a European tragedy whose consequences still resonate today.
Alen Mešković was born in Bosnia in 1977 and has lived in Denmark since 1994. His debut publication was the critically acclaimed poetry collection Første gang tilbage (First Time Back) in 2009. His first novel, Ukulele Jam (2011) was nominated for the literary award Weekendavisens Litteraturpris. It has been published in nine countries, including Germany, where it is also a long-running theatre production. In 2012, Alen Mešković was awarded a three-year working grant by the Danish Arts Foundation for the novel. Published in 2016, One-Man Tent, a stand-alone sequel of Ukulele Jam, is being translated into five languages.