Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some sixty-something books to his name. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among others. Yuri Herrera’s first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the Best Translated Book Award and was chosen by The Guardian as one of ‘The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century’. His second novel The Transmigration of Bodies was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and his sci-fi inflected collection of stories Ten Planets was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. He teaches at Tulane University, New Orleans. Margarita Valencia (Bogotá, 1958) has devoted most of her professional life to books, as editor, teacher, literary critic, translator. Her publishing projects have included the Bogotá publishing house Carlos Valencia Editores, literary collections edited for Grupo Editorial Norma, and Libro al viento, a publishing project aimed at closing the gap between the reader and the book. She has been a staff writer for several magazines (El Malpensante, Cambio, Arcadia, Guión), and the newspaper La Prensa, and her texts have been published in various anthologies. She conceived and directs the program in Book Studies in the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, and co-directs Los libros, a program that airs on National Public Radio. Deborah Levy is a British playwright, novelist and poet. Her novels include the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home (2011) and Hot Milk (2016), and the Booker-longlisted The Man Who Saw Everything (2019). Deborah is also the author of a collection of short stories, Black Vodka (2013), and a trilogy of prize-winning Living Autobiographies: Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate.Rosalind Harvey was born in Bristol in 1982. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She runs regular translation-related public events in the UK and is a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, an advice and support network for early-career literary translators. Lisa Dillman teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Her recent translations include The Bitch and Abyss by Pilar Quintana. Sir Salman Rushdie has received many awards for his writing, including the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993 Midnight’s Children was judged to be the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

‘These amazing new stories are not only a tribute to Cervantes and Shakespeare from some of the best contemporary authors writing in English and Spanish, they are also a tribute to the power of translation.’ Cristina Fuentes La Roche, Director, Hay Festival Americas