Romancero Books with the support of the Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs of the Spanish Embassy in London presents the Festival of Queer Spanish Literature in London - FQSLL
Eva Baltasar, Julia Sanches and Stefan Tobler in conversation with con Jorge Gárriz about the book Permafrost, published in English by And Other Stories
Eva Baltasar has published ten volumes of poetry to widespread acclaim. Her debut novel, Permafrost, received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book . It is the first novel in a triptych which aims to explore the universes of three different women in the first person. The author lives a simple life with her wife and two daughters in a village near the mountains.
Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. For And Other Stories she has translated from all three languages—from the Portuguese, Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques, from the Catalan the forthcoming Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, and from the Spanish, Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim award. She has also translated works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins, among others. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective, and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Stefan Tobler is the publisher of And Other Stories and, whenever time permits, a translator from Portuguese and German. He loves to read in French and Spanish too. His translation of Arno Geiger’s The Old King in His Exile was shortlisted for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and his other translations include the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize-shortlisted Água Viva by Clarice Lispector and the Man Booker International Prize-longlisted A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar.
And Other Stories publishes some of the best in contemporary writing, including many translations. They aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing. And they want to open up publishing so that from the outside it doesn’t look like some posh freemasonry. For example, as we said in this piece in The Guardian, we think more of the English publishing industry should move out of London, Oxford and their environs. In 2017 we moved our main office to Sheffield and found such a warm welcome. The move also helped us discover great new writing from the North of England, including Tim Etchells’ Endland, Amy Arnold’s Slip of a Fish and Rachel Genn’s What You Could Have Won.
Permafrost
The #1 Catalan bestseller and winner of the Llibreter booksellers prize.
Permafrost’s no-bullshit lesbian narrator is an uninhibited lover and a wickedly funny observer of modern life. Desperate to get out of Barcelona, she goes to Brussels, ‘because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like’; as an au pair in Scotland, she develops a hatred of the colour green. And everywhere she goes, she tries to break out of the roles set for her by family and society, chasing escape wherever it can be found: love affairs, travel, thoughts of suicide.
Full of powerful, physical imagery, this prize-winning debut novel by acclaimed Catalan poet Eva Baltasar was a word-of-mouth hit in its own language. It is a breathtakingly forthright call for women’s freedom to embrace both pleasure and solitude, and speaks boldly of the body, of sex, and of the self.
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Talk sponsored by the Institut Ramon Llull - Catalan language and culture abroad.
Event in English.
Pre-recordered talk available only during Friday 1 October.
Zoom link will be sent 24 hours before the opening of the festival.
Access to the festival available from every country around the world.
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Check the festival’s website for other events
bit.ly/FLQEL