Very Busy

I have been very busy, translating and parenting as usual but also judging the International Dublin Literary Award. That means reading 147 novels published in English during 2015, translations and original English writing nominated by libraries all over the world. I bought a special armchair for the purpose. It has been thrilling, enlightening and fascinating but time-consuming and of course I haven't been able to read many German books.

The two I've squeezed in and liked very much are Olga Grjasnowa's forthcoming Gott ist nicht schüchtern and Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen, both novels.

I'll also try and update my statistics on newly published original German fiction by gender to cover this spring. I'd hoped that someone else might start working on stats in German publishing but nobody seems to have gone for it so far.

And I just read Ekkehard Knörer's rather delightful nostalgic sigh of an essay about early German blogs. In that spirit, a personal revelation of sorts: I've been thinking quite hard about book reviewing, about whether I could do my bit to tip the scales in terms of women writing criticism and reviews in German publications. Two hurdles, though: it takes me a long time to write in German and I have no wish to pretend to be an all-knowing general authority without a personality. I wrote a slightly po-faced personal "manifesto" about how I would like to write reviews for German publications; maybe I'll put that here too.

Still thinking.