Literature 30

When Abdulrazak Gurnah released his 10th book, Afterlives, last year, his editor was sure it would become his first major bestseller. For more than three decades, he had drawn stellar reviews but never gained a large readership.

“I have felt there’s a much bigger audience for him out there,” says Alexandra Pringle, executive publisher of Bloomsbury, who has worked with Gurnah for more than 20 years. “I thought, ‘This is it, this is going to

Stephen Vizinczey, who drew on his war-torn youth in Hungary in writing an international bestseller chronicling a young man’s romantic experiences with older women, which he wrote in English a decade after fleeing his homeland, has died aged 88.

Vizinczey was two when his father, a village schoolmaster, was stabbed to death by a knife-wielding Nazi.

He was taught by Benedictine monks early in his life and spent much of his youth in the company of his widowed mother’s friends and relatives, and women. By the time he was 12, young Stephen – then Istvan – was helping to procure female companions for US soldiers in Europe and was embarking on the first steps of an erotic education that formed the background of his 1965 novel, In Praise of Older Women. He published the

University of Oklahoma students Sydney Sleeper, Andie Trillo and Jamie McCarley have been awarded first, second and third place, respectively, in the annual Neustadt Lit Fest poster design project. The students participated in the competition as part of an annual collaboration sponsored by World Literature Today magazine and the University of Oklahoma School of Visual Arts.

Sleeper’s winning design will be used in all the promotional materials for the 2021 Neustadt Festival, slated for Oct. 25-27 on the OU campus. The festival’s schedule of events and full list of featured writers, artists and scholars are available online.

The lit fest will feature Muscogee writer Cynthia Leitich Smith, the 10th NSK Prize laureate and New York Times best-selling author of books for young readers, including Hearts Unbroken, which won the American Indian Library Association’s Youth Literature Award. Ten visiting writers will also convene as the jury to select the winner of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Since 2011, School of Visual Arts undergraduate coordinator Karen Hayes-Thumann has incorporated this design project as part of an undergraduate course in visual communication. This year, WLT’s art director, Gayle L. Curry, and editor-in-chief, Daniel Simon, met with the students over Zoom to provide feedback and help them refine their concepts. The WLT staff then chose the winners from among the final projects.

“Sydney’s design is imaginative, and she has entwined Cynthia Leitich Smith’s love of reading and writing into a concept that will be engaging for this year’s festival,” said Curry.

First-place winner Sydney Sleeper is a rising junior at OU pursuing a degree in visual communication. Born and raised in Texas, she graduated from Lovejoy High School in 2018. With a lifelong passion for storytelling and reading, she has been drawing since she’s been able to hold a pencil. Her hopes are to one day be able to see more of the world and what it has to offer.

Second-place winner Andie Trillo is from Moore, Oklahoma. “As a sophomore studying visual communication at OU,” she writes, “I’ve been able to envelop myself in my passions and have come to realize the ability art has to create connections that may never have come to fruition without that medium. As a graphic designer, I hope to create pieces that can transcend language barriers and unite people under the universal communication medium that is art.”

Third-place winner Jamie McCarley, from Grapevine, Texas, is a rising junior at OU, also studying visual communication. She has a passion for design and after college wishes to pursue that passion professionally.

To learn more about the Neustadt prizes, visit neustadtprize.org

Today the New Yorker announced the longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. With such a wealth of talent on display, we don’t envy the judges’ task. To aid you, the reader, in appreciating the range of that talent, we’ve rounded up some of our recent coverage of the authors and translators who made the list. Congrats to all!

Naja Marie Aidt

When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book

Translated by Denise Newman

Coffee House Press

• Recent interview with Aidt on When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back
• An essay co-authored by Newman on poets and visual artists who use language in ways that blur the line between disciplines, with a particular emphasis on the environment.
• ​​​​​Forthcoming feature review of When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back in our Fall 2019 issue

Robert Calasso, who has died aged 80, was a writer who brought his works on the evolution of human consciousness to a worldwide audience through his prestigious Italian publishing house, Adelphi Edizioni.

Unravelling the questions in his enquiring mind about the thread that links cultures, eras and civilisations, his orbit encompassed everything from Indian mythology to assessments of historical figures such as 20th-century literary giant Franz Kafka.

People will lie about reading certain books because they think it makes them appear more cultured or highbrow, according to a new survey.

More than half of the 2,000 people asked in a Sky Arts poll admitted to pretending to read a book cover to cover, with To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, War and Peace and The Odyssey among the books people lie about reading the most.

Thirty-one per cent said they lied about the books they had read to seem more intelligent, while 37 per cent said they just wanted to join in a conversation about the book in question.

Those to answer the survey also admitted they put certain books on their shelves to make themselves look more cultured, while others memorised famous quotes to seem highbrow. One in 10 have posted a photo of themselves holding an “intellectual” book on social media, which they never picked up again.

The research was conducted to mark the live broadcast of Cheltenham Literary Festival, and discovered that, when challenged on details, people had a number of tactics to draw on. These include claiming they read the book so long ago that “the details are a blur”, relying on what they’d seen in TV or film adaptations, or feigning a coughing fit to change the subject.

Phil Edgar-Jones, director of Sky Arts, said: “We say we are a nation of readers, but it turns out we’re also a nation of fibbers when it comes to getting stuck into a book.”