conjunction

US writer Fiona Maazel, author of Last Last Chance (here>>), has done a great little piece for the website of A Public Space on Dorthe Nors' stories in English. Read Dorthe Nors: A Master of Conjunction here>>. While you're at it, buy the journal, too.

mirror lands honoured

Congratulations to Birgithe Kosovic, whose magnificent Det dobbelte land [Mirror Lands] just won the prestigious Weekendavisen Award for 2010.

There's an English sample out there somewhere, a short excerpt from which has already been put up here>>.

Publishers of the world arise from your slumbers!

wung-sung

Jesper Wung-Sung (born 1971) is an almost improbably productive writer whose hyperactive pen has produced at least a dozen books (all of them critically acclaimed) since winning the Danish Debutant's Award at the Copenhagen Book Fair in 1998. Throughout his work runs one glorious theme: male existence, dissected in all its phases in a remarkable blend of realism and absurdist humour. From the ecstatically received 2009 collection of stories Trælår [Dead Leg](Danish review here>>) comes a story which in every thinkable way is typical Wung-Sung right down to its cryptic title. It'll be published in Absinthe #16 this autumn, and I've called it Close only counts when you're doing your damnedest. It starts like this:

They had buried Mort the Wart in the yard.
Of course, they had not actually buried Mort the Wart in the yard. Not all of Mort the Wart, for his head was sticking up out of the lawn. It had been necessary, though, to gag him. To put a stop to his yelling. The cries. The screams.


Extract © Jesper Wung-Sung
Translation © Martin Aitken

red hair

Serving House Books in the US have just published an anthology of stories entitled The Girl With Red Hair, edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy. The book includes fine contributions by Danes Niels Hav, Line-Maria Lång (who graces the cover) and Dorthe Nors, whose story Gwen, Betsy and Anne-Marie Jensen appears in my translation. According to the publishers' site (here>>), the book will be available on Amazon soon. I got mine free.

prizes

Janne Teller's remarkable novel Nothing, published in my translation last year in the US and Canada by Simon & Schuster imprint Atheneum, has garnered noteworthy acclaim, being awarded a Printz Honor as one of the top five novels for young adults in the US last year, and a Batchelder Honor as one of the year's three best translated novels in the same category. These are actually major honours. I'd like to think they might have just a little bit to do with me. Nothing will be published in the UK and Commonwealth by Scottish publishing house Strident in April.

a public space

New York journal A Public Space (hereby warmly recommended) has linked to this blog. Meaning I'd better do something about it. Note new design. Note new enthusiasm. A Public Space has just published my translation of Dorthe Nors' magnificent story The Winter Garden in their issue #12. Buy it, it's great.