Speak of the devil... that Ilija Trojanow gets everywhere these days. The really rather excellent Booktrust translated fiction website now has an interview with him online, conducted by the site's editor James Smith. Asked why he thinks British readers are, ahem, slow to catch onto foreign-language writing, he gives the perfect answer:
The polite answer would be: as with the cuisine it takes time to discover and cherish the marvels of the diverse. And the impolite: a postcolonial mindset that still harbours illusions of grandeur and superiority. But then again, without the imported literatures within the English language, there wouldn’t be that much of a British literature to talk about. Forgive me, AL Kennedy!
You tell 'em, Ilija! (or Iliya, as he now seems to be transliterated)
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