It’s been another busy week on our project! The Bloggers Karamazov hosted an interview with the Dark Side‘s Cathy McAteer. Here she talks a bit about her Magarshack case study, taking us on a virtual tour around some of the surprises she found in the Penguin archive and Magarshack papers. Consider it a little taster of more things to come as our project gathers momentum. Our thanks to the North American Dostoevsky Society for making us welcome.

We’re also looking forward to some events on the near horizon… Cathy will be at the Translating Thought/Translating Literature conference at Sheffield University next week, 31st January and 01 February – be sure to come and say hello if you’re planning on being there too – and excitement is growing in all literary circles for the London Book Fair in March. We plan to attend and look forward to meeting some of our new followers there!

It’s been a busy January so far for RusTrans, getting our website and initial research plans off the ground while preparing for PhD recruitment. We’re starting work on our first two case studies, Pushkin in Grafton Street (Dr Maguire) and David Magarshack and Penguin Books (Dr McAteer). We’ll continue posting research updates and other breaking translation news on this blog. For now, I’ll sign off with the exciting news that one of my favourite recent Russian novels, Evgenii Vodolazkin’s The Aviator (translated by Lisa Hayden) has just been longlisted for the prestigious EBRD Literature Prize, now entering its second year. Last year a very different Russian author, Boris Akunin’s All The World’s A Stage translated by Andrew Bromfield, made the prize shortlist; let’s hope Russia has even better luck in 2019. The winner will be announced on March 7.

To explain why I admire The Aviator so much, here’s a recent Guardian review of the novel by Simon Ings, and if you want a longer read, here’s one I wrote earlier.