Marcus Hijkoop

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Marcus Hijkoop

When the French writer Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, only one of his books was in print in English. It wasn’t for lack of trying: over the course of Modiano’s 57-year writing career, no fewer than 16 publishers and 16 translators have worked to bring his novels – 32 to date – to Anglophone readers. Yet many of those novels undersold and fell out of print before he won literature’s highest prize.

2 months ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Marcus Hijkoop |Matt McManus |Todd Shy |Vincent Lloyd

You should always be skeptical when writers announce that they are finished writing. In 2011, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård closed his six-part, 3,600-page autobiographical novel My Struggle by celebrating that he was “finally finished” and by “revel[ing] in, truly revel[ing] in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.” He went on to publish more than a dozen books in as many years.

May 29, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Marcus Hijkoop

Troops gather near a Mark I tank at Flanders, September 1916 Credit: Alamy When the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, the French novelist and First World War veteran Louis-Ferdinand Céline fled his country of birth for Germany.

Jul 13, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Marcus Hijkoop |Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey

‘The Drinkers,’ by Federico Starnone (Europa Editions) The Italian novelist Domenico Starnone has long been rumored to be the writer behind the works of the best-selling, pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante. In 2005, the Italian literary critic Luigi Galella noted in La Stampa that there were marked thematic and lexical similarities between Starnone’s Strega Prize–winning novel Via Gemito (2000) and Ferrante’s debut novel L’amore molesto (1992), published in English as Troubling Love in 2006.