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Dec 1, 2024 | 
literaryreview.co.uk | Damion Searls
Morning and Evening, the latest novel by the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse to be published in English, is a slim book, but it was a big deal when it first appeared in his home country in 2000. It was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, one of the most prestigious Scandinavian literary awards, and although Fosse didn’t win it, he told his local paper that the nomination had given him ‘a push to write more novels’.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Damion Searls
In my late twenties, when I was interested in maybe becoming a translator but didn’t know how to go about doing such a thing, my mother suggested I try getting in touch with our old neighborhood friend Edie. I had read Dr. Seuss at her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, later babysat her son. She’s stopped teaching and become a translator, my mother said. What language? I asked. My mother didn’t know, maybe Spanish?
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Anna Badkhen |Damion Searls |Iman Mersal |Mariana Enríquez
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
thebookerprizes.substack.com | Jon Fosse |Damion Searls
This September, as the seasons begin to turn, we’d love you to join us in reading (or re-reading) The Other Name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse, translated into English by Damion Searls. The novel, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020, marks the beginning of an epic seven-part sequence which offers a profound exploration of the human condition. It is Fosse’s magnum opus.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
thebookerprizes.com | Fitzcarraldo Editions |Jon Fosse |Damion Searls
Skip to main content Jon Fosse’s Septology is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly uniqueIn his magnum opus, Septology, a unique seven-novel sequence, Jon Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
thebookerprizes.com | Fitzcarraldo Editions |Jon Fosse |Damion Searls
Your Septology septet is written in your trademark style and could be described as a seven-part novel written in a single sentence. Could you explain what prompted you to structure the septet in this way and how you intended it to shape the reader’s experience? I prefer not to plan anything before I start writing. At a certain point I have a feeling that the novel is already written, and I just have to write it down before it disappears.
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May 13, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Jon Fosse |Damion Searls
Now what can I say about the fact that I ended up as a playwright? I wrote novels and poems, and had no desire to write for the theater, but the time came when I did so because, as part of a publicly funded effort to get people to write more modern Norwegian plays, I was offered quite a large amount of money, for the impoverished writer I was at the time, to write the opening scene of a play.
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Feb 14, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Damion Searls |Sasa Stanisic |Nina Perrotta
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a book with an aura. His name, let’s admit it, is already a vibe; the title sets an extremely highbrow tone; the paragraphs are all numbered, promising a very impressive logical rigor, even if questions linger. (Is 6.2322 really exactly one level more primary than 5.47321?
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Jan 1, 2024 | 
thebookerprizes.com | Jon Fosse |Damion Searls |Geetanjali Shree |Daisy Rockwell
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy RockwellFor the literary embodiment of the saying ‘new year, new you’, we give an emphatic nod in the direction of Geetanjali Shree’s 2022 International Booker Prize-winning novel Tomb of Sand. A 739-page tour de force, it follows an octogenarian, ‘Ma’, bound in a deep depression over her husband’s recent death. But Ma doesn’t give up that easily and emerges, butterfly-like, with a brand new lease of life, ready to take on the world.
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Dec 5, 2023 | 
themillions.com | Damion Searls
A Year in Reading: Damion Searls As a translator, I write books I’ve also read, so in a way you’d have to say that the books at the center of my year in reading were the ones I started or finished translating: Thomas Mann, New Selected Stories; Victoria Kielland, My Men; Ariane Koch, Overstaying; Anna Stern, all this here, now.; Jon Fosse, A Shining and How It Was; Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Uwe...
