Claire Storey

Announcing: World Kid Lit LIVE Central Europe

Following the success of our World Kid Lit LIVE panel discussions in 2020, we are thrilled to announce our next exciting session focusing on Central European Literature for Young Readers: Trends and Highlights. Alexandra Büchler tells us more…

We are launching the 2021 series of #WorldKidLitLIVE sessions with a visit to Central Europe!

Oscar seeks a friend by
PAWEŁ PAWLAK, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Boribon, the Kuflis, Arnica the Duck Princess, Krtek the little mole, Pitrýsek the gnome and the little sad skeleton Ignatek aka Oscar, who seeks a friend – these are just some of the characters we will meet in the first World Kid Lit Live event of 2021. 

The panelists will introduce veteran writers and newcomers alike, and talk about why more Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak books for children – classics and contemporary – should be available in English. What are the stories – some entertaining, some addressing difficult subjects – that have captured the imagination of successive generations of young readers in the ‘heart of Europe’? And which stand out among the most recent crop of popular picture books?

Joining us on our expert panel are:

Anna Bentley A British translator of Hungarian literature living in Budapest. She has translated Ervin Lázár’s children’s classic, Arnica the Duck Princess (Pushkin Press), and Anna Menyhért’s study of five forgotten Hungarian women writers, Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers (Brill). Since then, her work has appeared on Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday blog, in Trafika Europe’s online journal, Panel Magazine and Consequence Magazine. Her translations of contemporary poets such as Mónika Mesterházi, Zsófia Balla and Béla Markó have appeared on Hungarian Literature Online.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is known as UK’s leading translator of Polish authors, including the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, Jacek Dehnel, Mariusz Szczygieł, and Artur Domosławski. In 2018 she was honored with Poland’s Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. Her translations of illustrated children’s books include Julian Tuwim’s Mr Miniscule and the Whale (Book Island), Maps and Under Earth, Under Water by Alexandra and Daniel Mizieliński (Big Picture Press), and Oscar Seeks a Friend by Paweł Pawlak (Lantana). She has also translated novels for children including Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak (Penlight Press) and Clementine Loves Red by Krystyna Boglar (Pushkin Press, co-translated with Zosia Krasodomska-Jones).

Bratislava: The Magic Metropolis by Michal Hvorecký

Julia Sherwood translates fiction and non-fiction, mainly from and into Slovak, as well as Czech, Polish and Russian. With her husband Peter Sherwood she has translated works by a number of Slovak and Czech writers, including Bratislava: The Magic Metropolis, a children’s book by Michal Hvorecký. She is the co-editor of the anthology Into the Spotlight: New Writing from Slovakia with Magdalena Mullek, with whom she has launched and co-curates the website SlovakLiterature.Com. She serves as the editor-at-large for Slovakia for Asymptote and has organized literary events to promote Slovak literature in the UK.

Moderator:
Alexandra Büchler is director of Literature Across Frontiers, editor and translator of poetry, fiction and non-fiction between her native Czech and English, and contributor to WorldKidLit blog. Among the authors she has translated into Czech are J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, Gail Jones and Janice Galloway, and the YA author Isobelle Carmody. She was editor of the Six Poets bilingual series of anthologies from Arc Publications, from 2006 to 2016. Her translation of the Czech modern classic novel The House of a Thousand Floors by Jan Weiss was published in 2016, and she is currently working on translation of selected poems by Kateřina Rudčenková.

If you missed this free event, the recording is available our Facebook page. In the next few days it will also be made available on our YouTube channel. You can also catch up with any of our previous sessions:

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