Bernardo Atxaga – författare

The Accordionist's Son is a remarkably powerful and accomplished novel, exploring the life of David Imaz, a former inhabitant of the Basque village of Obaba, now living in exile and ill-health on a ranch in California.As a young man, David divides his time between his uncle's ranch and his life in the village, where he reluctantly practises the accordion on the insistence of his authoritarian father. Increasingly aware of the long shadow cast by the Spanish Civil War, he begins to unravel the story of the conflict, his father's association with the fascists and his uncle's opposition and brave decision to hide a wanted republican. Caught betweeen the two men, the course of his own life is changed forever when he agrees to shelter a group of students on the run from the military police.Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

One of only a hundred or so books originally written in the Basque language during the last four centuries, Obabakoak is a shimmering, mercurial novel about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic, Basque village. Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, whilst everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page.Obabakoak is a dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts and literary theory, all held together by Atxaga's distinctive and tenderly ironic voice.

1903, and Captain Lalande Biran, overseeing a garrison on the banks of the Congo, has an ambition: to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafés of Paris. His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad.At the Captain’s side are an ex-legionnaire womaniser, and a servile, treacherous man who dreams of running a brothel. At their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liège.

"A brilliantly inventive writer" A.S. BYATT"The most important Basque writer of his generation" Times Literary Supplement"Not just a Basque novelist but the Basque novelist" GuardianTheir lives run into each other, like water running over stonesAs the Basque mining town of Ugarte moves from the hazy summer of the 1972 Olympics, through the mining strikes of the turbulent Eighties and into the modern day, her people navigate the silences, secrets, joys and tragedies of their lives.From the story of a traumatised teenage boy at the town's bakery, to the tale of a group of comrades on an army base in the twilight of Franco's dictatorship, the interconnected narratives of Water Over Stones confront the changes time brings to Ugarte's close-knit community, as the lives of its inhabitants run into to each other like water running between stones.This extraordinary novel of friendship, nature, love and the immensity of death shows Bernardo Atxaga's mastery of his craft, and his ability to create places and characters that are impossible to forget.Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Margaret Jull-Costa

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 2Six Basque Poets is the second volume in a new series of bilingual anthologies which brings the work of contemporary poets from Europe and beyond to a wider English-language readership, a series which aims to keep a finger on the 'here and now' of international contemporary poetry.The six poets included in this collection have played a defining role in the development of Basque-language poetry in the last thirty years, since the arrival of what we have come to refer to as the 'democratic age' in Spain and the Basque Country. They represent the diversity of voices and poetic schools that populate the contemporary Basque literary scene, where a variety of tendencies has emerged in the recent decades: a range of different poetics, use of various narrative styles, a preference for a non-aesthetic approach that dwells within the quotidian and an emergence of female voices that reclaim other codes and other universes.Direct, moving and thought-provoking, the poetry in the present volume gives us insight into the preoccupations of a literary milieu which may be marginalized by its use of an ancient language not spoken outside its territory but which is as powerful and original in its production as any of the literary centres in today's Europe.The featured poets: Rikardo Arregi, Bernardo Atxaga, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe, Joseba Sarrionandia.