Q & A: English PEN

English PEN is the founding centre of a worldwide writers’ association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. The organisation campaigns to defend writers and readers around the world whose right to freedom of expression is at risk.

PEN works to remove inequalities which prevent people’s enjoyment of, and learning from, literature. It matches writers with marginalised groups, such as refugees, and women and young people who have been victims of trafficking.

PEN promotes translation into English of published work in foreign languages which is considered to be of outstanding literary merit. Many of these works are to be found on World Bookshelf, its collection of contemporary literature in translation. Meanwhile, PEN Atlas features literary dispatches from around the world.

Erica Jarnes, Writers in Translation Programme Manager, and Cat Lucas, who runs the Writers at Risk Programme, collaborated on answering questions.

Asian Authors/Books From Asia Meetup

  At the Diana Green History lecture by Elif Shafak,  

Following on from last week’s post about Asia Bookroom, the bookshop in Australia devoted to books with Asian interest, here’s a guest post from Mariam Mathew, organizer of a book club in London devoted to discussing books by Asian authors, and books about Asia.

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

The Bear Whispers to Me by Chang Ying-Tai, translated by Darryl Sterk reviewed by Peter Gordon
Outside reading: links to essays and articles on writing, literature, translation selected by Peter Gordon
Massage by Bi Feiyu reviewed byTimothy Sifert
Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson by Richard J. Grace reviewed by Jonathan Chatwin

The Sunday Post: Bibliotherapy

In Asia, we’re used to supplementing antibiotics with a whole range of other therapies: Ayurveda, TCM, Malay Traditional Medicine, and so on and so forth. Now readers can try bibliotherapy: the prescribing of fiction for life’s ailments, physical, or emotional.  Or so bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin suggest. They have collaborated on The Novel Cure, a pharmacopoeia – with a difference.

Teaching translation at the Chengdu Bookworm Festival / Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman is a much-acclaimed translator of Chinese into English. She focusses on fiction, poetry and occasionally literary non-fiction, by authors such as Chen Xiwo, Han Dong, Hong Ying, Xinran, Yan Geling and Zhang Ling. Her translation of Dorothy Tse's Snow and Shadow is on the longlist for the Best Translated Book Award 2015.

Nicky here writes about teaching translation, in China. 

A Day In The Life Of Asia Bookroom

A Day In The Life Of…is an occasional series in which booksellers and people working in the publishing industry talk about their working day.  Here, Lynette Thomas, of Asia Bookroom, talks about a day in the shop.

For over 30 years, Asia Bookroom, in Macquarie, Australia, has specialised in new, out of print and antiquarian books of Asian interest.

So: over to Lynette…

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews:

Jim's Terrible City: JG Ballard and Shanghai by James H Bollen reviewed by John D. Van Fleet
Poetry: The Game of 100 Ghosts by Terry Watada reviewed by Todd Shimoda
The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia's Environmental Emergency by Mark L. Clifford reviewed by Doug Ogden
Fortune’s Ten must-read books that explain modern China reviewed by Peter Gordon.