Shumona Sinha and Maylis de Kerangal in conversation with Lauren Elkin and Russell Williams
Meet Shumona Sinha and Maylis de Kerangal in a conversation about their newly translated short novels, Down with the Poor! and Eastbound.
First published in France in 2011, both books centre around a confrontation between a man and a woman. One on the Trans-Siberian railway, between a Russian conscript and an older French passenger, the other between an asylum seeker and a court interpreter, on the Paris metro.
Joined by translator & author Lauren Elkin and Russell Williams, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature (American University of Paris), they will discuss states of confinement and State violence, freedom of movement and freedom of speech, identification (or not) with the Other (with or without a common language), and the role of literature in revealing boundaries as grey areas.
About our Guests:
Maylis de Kerangalis the author of the novelNaissance d’un pont(Birth of a Bridge), which won the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis in 2010. In 2014, her fifth novelRéparer les vivants(Mend the Living) was published to wide acclaim in France, winning the Grand Prix RTL-Lire award and the student choice novel of the year from France Culture andTélérama. In the UK, it was longlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2016, and won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017 – only the second novel and the first work in translation ever to do so. It was also one of theWall Street Journal’s Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016.Eastbound, translated by Jessica Moore, is to be published by Les Fugitives on 29 September 2022
Shumona Sinhawas born and grew up in Calcutta, West Bengal. In 1990 she won Bengal’s Best Young Poet award. She started learning French at the age of twenty-two and moved to Paris a few years later. Her first novel,Fenêtre sur l’abîme, was published in 2008. Her award-winning second novel,Assommons les pauvres !, was translated into German, Arabic, Italian and Hungarian, and adapted for stage in Germany and Austria. Her third novel,Calcutta(2014), received the Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises, awarded by the Académie française, and the Grand Prix du Roman of the Société des gens de lettres. Her most recent novel,Le testament russe, was published in March 2020 by Éditions Gallimard.Down with the Poor!, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, was published by Les Fugitives on 4 August 2022
Lauren Elkinis a Franco-American writer and translator. Her last book,Flâneuse: Women Walk the Citywas a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her translation, with Charlotte Mandell, of Claude Arnaud’s biography of Jean Cocteau, won the 2017 French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize. Her next book,Art Monsters: on Beauty and Excess, is to be published by Chatto & Windus. She currently lives in London, with her partner and son.
Russell Williamsis Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. He is the author of a book about Michel Houellebecq and is the co-editor of the recentContemporary Fiction in French(Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is Consultant Editor at theTimes Literary Supplementwhere he specialises in French and Francophone books.