Most of my reading this March will be taken up with the International Booker Prize, but there are a couple of other events coming up that I want to tell you about.
Boekenweek
From 7-15 March is Boekenweek in the Netherlands, an annual celebration of books. A couple of years ago, the Dutch publisher World Editions organised a blog tour for Boekenweek that I took part in, and they’re doing the same again this year.
As part of the 2020 tour, I will be running a couple of extracts from Dutch novels in translation. On Sunday 8 March, there’ll be an excerpt from The Blessed Rita by Tommy Wieringa (tr. Sam Garrett), and on Wednesday 11 March it’s the turn of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (tr. Michele Hutchison).
Dylan Thomas Prize
Starting on 5 March, there’s a big blog tour in support of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, which is for writers aged 39 or under. A total of 66 bloggers will be reviewing the books on the longlist.
I’ll have a couple of posts as part of the Dylan Thomas Prize tour. I will be concentrating on poetry: on Tuesday 24 March I’ll be looking at Flèche by Mary Jean Chan, and on Monday 6 April it will be If All the World and Love were Young by Stephen Sexton.
2nd March 2020 at 2:06 pm
Flėche and When All the World And Love Were Young are both very impressive collections.