Litfest: International Fiction Book Club (catch-up)

Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey: Still Born 

Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize

The Litfest International Online Fiction Book Club was launched in response to the pandemic in April 2020. Since then, we have discussed more than 45 books with their authors, translators, editors and critics. Our guests have included authors Andrey Kurkov, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Delphine de Vigan, translators Angela Rodel (Georgi Gospodinov), Damion Searls (Jon Fosse) and Saskia Vogel (Balsam Karam), and Latin American expert Gerald Martin on Juan Rulfo. 

For this special edition of the book club we are delighted to welcome both the author Guadalupe Nettel and her translator Rosalind Harvey to discuss with us Nettel’s powerful novel Still Born. 

In an interview for the International Booker Prize Guadalupe Nettel said: 

‘Many demands weigh on mothers. They are always compared to an unattainable stereotype, one that has made women feel inadequate. Not to mention those who decide to remain childless, who are rarely represented in literature up to now. To me, Still Born is a novel which affirms female choices and which challenges patriarchal ideas of motherhood and maternal instinct.’ 

Rosalind Harvey has translated many writers including Juan Pablo Villalobos, Elvira Navarro, Alberto Barrera Tyszka and Enrique Vila-Matas. Their work has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Harvey is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a founding member of the Emerging Translators Network. 

For more about the book club go to: http://www.litfest.org/international-fiction-book-club/

Photo of Guadalupe Nettel ©  Mely Ávila 

Photo of Rosalind Harvey © David Ridley