As 2022 comes to an end, we invited some more of our editors, writers and collaborators to write about something they had read/heard/watched/seen/played/experienced over the past year that made a significant impact on them.
It could be something they had recently discovered or something they found themselves returning to time and time again. We asked everyone—nicely, of course—to choose one thing and one thing only to write about.
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Dean Browne
The pandemic drove it home to me just how essential a space music occupies in my life, almost or just as much as poetry. During lockdown, tuning into John Kelly’s Mystery Train and Bernard Clarke’s Blue of the Night (both on RTÉ Lyric FM) became a routine that helped stay me against the confusion day to day, and I’ll still often have a little (strictly instrumental) music going while I write. At this moment, it’s Nala Sinephro’s excellent record Space 1.8, which has been an undoubted highlight for me in 2022.
According to Spotify, my top band this year was Silver Jews, with ‘Trains Across the Sea’ being singled out specially. Lately I’ve found myself absently strumming the two chords of this song on my old black Epiphone acoustic guitar, C major to F major. Troubles, no troubles. It feels apt that Silver Jews should feature in a short personal ramble on music and poetry. Lyrics such as ‘it’s been evening all day long’ instantly evoke Wallace Stevens, who writes in ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’: ‘It was evening all afternoon’. David Berman was a poet, with the confident and playful allusiveness of wide, involved reading behind him. He was also a student of another favourite poet of mine, James Tate. (When Berman gave him a copy of Starlite Walker, the Silver Jews album on which ‘Trains Across the Sea’ appears, Tate is meant to have said: ‘Don’t quit your day job!’)
There’s a fair bit of intertextual dialogue arising out of mutual respect between them. The title of Tate’s last collection The Government Lake was lifted from Berman’s poem ‘Classic Water’ in the only collection he published, Actual Air. And while ‘Purple Mountains’, Berman’s moniker after disbanding Silver Jews, supposedly came from a mondegreen in ‘America the Beautiful’, ‘the purple mountains majesties’, what I think of is Tate’s poem ‘Ashes of Roses’ in Memoir of the Hawk, in particular the lines ‘the purple mountain’s/ silver cloud’. (Incidentally, ‘Cloud’ became David Berman’s middle name. And silver? Stop me!)
I’m ending this year much like I started it by playing some music low and tinkering with a poem. Dreaming of trains across the sea.
Dean Browne was a recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.
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Sasha de Buyl
When I first encountered Alexander Chee’s writing I was astonished, and then embarrassed. Astonished at the work, embarrassed that I’d never come across it before. Though I have loved every scrap of his writing I have read since, it’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his collection of essays, that I return to again and again. Cherry-picking from the best of Chee’s essays from the past decade or so, the book has the feel of a Selected Poems; what you get as a reader is a finely cut version of some rare stone. Each essay shows you a different facet of the writer and a different aspect from which to take in his work. Or to put it more simply, it’s bangers all the way through.
This year’s favourite is ‘The Writing Life’, a version of which you can read here. This beautiful essay is about a class Chee took with Annie Dillard in 1989, and paints a picture of Dillard, of their relationship (warm, respectful, funny) and of Dillard’s approach to writing pedagogy. It’s a masterclass in writing and, quite literally, a masterclass in writing, and has taught me more about writing in my regular re-readings than I care to admit.
I knew on first reading that How to Write an Autobiographical Novel wasn’t done with me yet. It took me a surprisingly long time to finish, not just because it has the kind of perfect sentences that make you stop and wonder how he did that. That first time I read it, I didn’t have a lot of room in my head to unpack what I was reading. Every time I return to it, I get to unpack a little more.
Sasha de Buyl writes short stories and creative non-fiction. Their work has been published in Gutter, Bloomers and Belfield Literary Review among others. In 2022, they were awarded an Arts Council Agility Award for Literature.
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Danny Denton
This Christmas I am re-reading The Evenings by Gerard Reve. An astonishing novel, first published in Dutch in 1947, it follows a 23-year-old named Frits on ten dull evenings over Christmas. Frits is an office-worker, daydreamer, purveyor of dodgy jokes and bad dreams; he finds life completely absurd. I say ‘astonishing’: it’s an astonishingly funny novel, profoundly moving at times, and the best I’ve read about boredom. Frits dreams; Frits calls round to friends; while nothing really happens, at the same time it’s haunting and marvellously atmospheric. There’s a constant tension between Frits’s thoughts and his words. I remember thinking ten pages in that this guy was annoying, and the way dialogue was presented (without line breaks) was frustrating, but within fifty pages I knew I was reading a masterpiece (all the more astonishing because Reve was 24 when it was published).
The Evenings is also brilliantly insightful on adult child-parent relationships. Over and over, as Frits watches his father blow his nose or his mother eating, I was guffawing at his commentary. (‘His father… examined the linen closely and put the handkerchief away. “Approved and accepted with no visible anomalies”, Frits said…’) It would have been infuriating to watch me reading this with that big stupid grin on my face the whole time. Frits would have hated it.
What’s the book actually about? Fear of turning into one’s parents? Boredom? Unfulfilment? Christmas? I don’t know. But I’m very excited, typing this up, to spend this Christmas with Frits again.
Danny Denton‘s most recent novel is All Along The Echo. He lectures on writing at University College Cork, and is a contributing editor for The Stinging Fly.
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Nicole Flattery
A book I read for the first time this year was Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country. I’m a Wharton fan—The Age of Innocence is probably my favourite novel—but even I was surprised by how much I loved this. Has there ever been a better depiction of a social climber? Undine Spragg is gorgeous, ladylike, ambitious and in need of a filthy rich husband (or several). People mistake her beauty for vulnerability, and she uses their naivete against them. Everyone’s too busy admiring her style and good looks to notice they should be extremely frightened of her. She’s deeply impatient—with bad taste, ugliness, dullness, boredom. Nothing brings her more pleasure than a good party, a fashionable dress, a favourable glance. She’s an assassin; she might be the most vicious character ever written. What I mean to say: she is an icon, the moment. There’s something sadly modern about her too. When she’s asked what she wants she simply replies, ‘I want what the others want.’ Poor Undine, even her desires aren’t her own. Wharton is interesting because she’s never instructive; no good deed goes unpunished in her work.
Speaking of the morally ambiguous, I also watched a lot of film noir, of which my favourite was The Last Seduction. What can I say? I love to see women getting away with things.
Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2023. Nicole took over as host of our podcast in September 2022.
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Elaine Garvey
On 18 November, I watched a performance on the Irish tour of MÁM by Teaċ Daṁsa, Cormac Begley and the orchestral collective, s t a r g a z e, in a school hall in Boyle, County Roscommon. There was no stage, no lighting rig, no tabs. What was in front of the audience was a raised steel platform, a kitchen table with a drawer and some wooden chairs. The music came first, then the movement.
I had recently read a popular science book and learned that gravity is not what I thought it was, a singular force, but more a case of matter and spacetime causing change in each other. Every evening for about a month, I sat on the swings in a local playground trying to understand what I’d read and why it had taken me so long to find out. Then I saw MÁM. Then I listened to radio interviews with the choreographer, Michael Keegan-Dolan, and Cormac Begley’s CDs. After that, I watched the documentary film by Pat Collins about the collaborative process of making the show.
People moving in space to music. A kiss with twenty-two different meanings. Crisps and fizzy orange. Centring simple forms and openness when we’ve been taught to want complexity. The intensity of their skill brought about a crossing point in me. A clear view of how the contents of a space influence movement and a stunning proof that the creation of something is an exchange of energy, a meeting of forces, and it predates everything.
Elaine Garvey is a writer from County Sligo. She is currently working on a novel. Her knowledge of physics and dance is negligible.
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Conner Habib
I keep thinking about what Torrey Peters said in May.
At the International Literature Festival Dublin, Torrey said she wrote her novel Detransition, Baby for trans women, otherwise she’d have to lead every cisgender person through the basics.
I’d mulled over something like this before, but Torrey’s articulation revealed to me a cruelty: people of colour, LGBT people, sex workers, anyone in the so-called margins, aren’t permitted to write fiction. Not really. Instead, our creativity must be ushered swiftly into the political.
Some people—many of whom are thoughtful and I like very much—suggested I market Hawk Mountain via political language. Characters became identities, story became socio-political struggle. Surely this novel was about “toxic masculinity” or “queerness”? Oddly, I found myself in the position of insisting my novel be presented as a novel, allowing individual readers their own way in.
Of course, I wanted readers who found LGBT themes, or identified with the Arab character in the white town, and so on, to resonate with the intensities of the meanings they discovered. But these should be found and resonated with out of each reader’s freedom.
Yes, I know, I know, “Everything is political.” “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” etc.
There are, of course, plenty of beautiful novels that forefront identity and struggle; many of them rightfully and widely celebrated. But too often, mediocre writers—encouraged by curators with money and platforms—are selected to lend a feeling of knowledge to people who aren’t us. And almost all art by marginalised people is dressed up as art “about” political propositions. As a result, most people don’t know what Syrian fiction looks like, or LGBT fiction, or any of the other fiction from the “margins.” Even if it is in front of them.
Why do so few ask why those most affected by the train are forced or reduced to writing about the train? Who pushed us onto the train and what would happen if we refused to bring everything we create on board?
Conner Habib is the author of the novel Hawk Mountain and the host of the culture, occult, and philosophy podcast, Against Everyone with Conner Habib. He lives in Dublin.
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Molly Hennigan
The first time I read Nick Laird’s poem ‘Up Late’, I layered what I knew of his voice from other readings and interviews on top. When the poem won the Forward Prize last month his reciting of it was described as ‘haunting’. Each time I read the poem I am haunted by different things.
One of my last phone calls with my grandmother during lockdown. The time the nurse forgot to hang up and my grandmother, having lost dexterity, and perhaps in an effort to end the call, dropped the phone on the floor. I stayed on the line for minutes and minutes and listened to the shuffle of her feet in the slippers I knew she would be wearing. Laird mentions ‘the instant of the hand itself turning from the subject into object’ but you don’t want to be waiting for that. Or don’t want to feel like you are waiting for that. He mentions the vanity of grief too. It is not lost on him.
Watching my granduncle’s funeral online. Six familiar family heads popping up and down on the bottom of my screen like iTunes updates responding to the demands of the Mass. I let my cup of tea go cold. It would be disrespectful, I figured, to drink tea. I knew my grandaunt was watching from her house. If she drank tea, or something stronger, it wouldn’t have been disrespectful but I couldn’t take her cue. Couldn’t recreate ritual alone.
This Christmas my partner is doing the ‘grief work’ Laird describes. These are the series of days and weeks when he is someone’s son before he is someone’s partner or friend or colleague and they seem harder for it.
When I look back on this year, I imagine ‘Up Late’ will be my marker of ritual and ceremony.
Molly Hennigan is a writer based in Galway. Her writing appears in The Stinging Fly, Tolka, Banshee and The Pig’s Back. Her first collection of essays The Celestial Realm is forthcoming in 2023.
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Maria Johnston
‘The movie is over, yet the screening reels on through your eyes […] In the dark you’d been watching a storm that will not die down in the light.’
—Denise Riley, ‘Beggars of Life’ (Lurex, 2022)
In the pandemic world of virtual poetry events there was one, in late 2021, that shook it to the core: Nick Laird’s reading of ‘Up Late’, a tender, tortured elegy for his father who’d died of Covid some months earlier. Although I’d already seen and admired the poem in Granta magazine – it has just won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Poem – this stunned on a whole different level.
There was the poet on screen, alone in a white room, in camera, both intimate and at a distance, not quite meeting our eyes, speaking not to an audience but directly to the dead:
Dad,
I cannot stay in the room with you too
long in my mind. It is too hard. I thought
there would be futurity.
As Laird read, as the force of the poem’s formal feeling hit the screen, the pressure of words exerted a power greater than any flash of breaking news. ‘I want the poem to destroy time’, he announced, defying the laws of reality, and time itself felt and moved differently for the duration. The walls throbbed, closed in. The poem itself turned into a dark panic room. No exit. No release.
And so, although ‘the eye adjusts, even to darkness, / even to the presence of what overwhelms us’, this arresting, unforgettable performance of elegy as ‘words to bind a grief / in […] to keep it from escaping’, will not die down in the light.
Maria Johnston is a poetry critic and academic. She is the co-editor, with Conor Linnie, of Irish Women Poets Rediscovered (Cork University Press, 2021).
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William Keohane
Ten years ago, I lost my battered copy of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and replaced it with the movie tie-in edition, and this is the copy that I still have. On the cover, two figures run on a wooden boardwalk towards a misty horizon. It was my favourite book, but back then, I couldn’t tell you why. It might have been the love triangle. Every piece of media had a love triangle when I was sixteen. This did very little to prepare me for adulthood because, so far, love triangles have been mostly absent from my life! (It is possible that I’m the problem). When I turned twenty-six this year I decided to re-read it. I have this tendency to read things as trans when they are obviously not (e.g. Neapolitan ice cream, tortoiseshell cats, W. B. Yeats). But this book. It was almost painful to realise why it might have resonated so deeply. Tommy, Kathy and Ruth navigate issues of identity, autonomy, and embodiment; living in a body that both is and is not yours. I felt this, deeply, but had no language for it at sixteen. I don’t have it now, though I’m closer. There was something in this book I needed, and it’s still one of my favourites, and I will keep going back to it. In another decade, I wonder what it will mean, how I will read it, and if it will still be, for me, a kind of boardwalk towards the past.
William Keohane‘s essays have been published in British GQ, The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly, and Banshee. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Ormston House.
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Thomas McCarthy
Of all the beautiful things I saw in 2022, it was a garden that moved me to tears. No ordinary garden this, for I’d been reading about it since 1973 or 1974. And there I was in April of this year, nearly half a century after I’d first read about it, in the garden of Renishaw Hall, the home of the defiant, rich and eccentric Sitwells. Here Osbert crafted his best books of memoir, here Sacheverell wrote of the European Baroque, and here the poet Dame Edith Sitwell, crafted her eccentric and provocative poems with the help of William Walton. I’d read in Osbert’s glorious memoir, Left Hand, Right Hand!, how his father, before abandoning the family to live at Monteguffoni near Florence, had planned and planted this Italianate garden of closely columned yew hedges and classical statuary in defiance of conventional neighbours. Now, a great purple wisteria enveloped windows where Osbert once wrote. Ceanothus impressus ‘Puget Blue’ flung its light florets in thick iodine abandon; brick-coloured and scarlet euphorbias scented the air; and the woods, my God, the astonishing decision to plant long columns of beech hedging and hedges of early pink shrub roses a hundred metres deep into woodland. It was an uncanny, astonishing sight, like a still from a Hitchcock film. There are days, after long wandering and aimless scrambling for words, when you know that you’ve fallen among your own tribe. That was the day, the day I saw Renishaw; and the more than one hundred books written by the three unhappy children of Sir George Sitwell, they assumed a three-dimensional life, standing up to greet me.
Thomas McCarthy’s most recent books are Poetry, Memory and the Party (Gallery, 2021) and Prophecy (Carcanet, 2019). Originally from County Waterford, he lives in Cork.
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Mary Morrissy
The painter Una Watters (1918-65) has taken up a lot of my energy this year. I curate a website dedicated to her and was heavily involved in organising a retrospective exhibition of her work in March at the United Arts Club in Dublin. The retrospective followed a three-year quest to locate Watters’ work, which is largely undocumented and scattered widely in private ownership.
When you’re taken up in the swirl of advocacy and promotion, you can sometimes lose sight of the spark that prompted it. Luckily, I have a constant reminder in the form of an Una Watters painting, Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain (1959) that I’ve lived with for over 20 years, and which first begged the question—who was Una Watters?
The painting depicts a woman in full profile, dressed in a red coat, gripping an umbrella and bent against the wind, passing in front of Trinity College Dublin. In the top left-hand corner the plinth (and legs!) of Oliver Goldsmith’s statue is just visible, but it’s the rain that commands your attention. Jagged slashes with almost solid geometrical shadows sweep downwards from left to the right of the canvas. You can sense the physicality of the driving rain, sharp as razor blades, flinty and unforgiving. It’s a dirty Dublin day.
I return to Girl daily, and am still seeing new things in it—e.g. how the rib-tips of the umbrella hold tremulous drops of rain. The exacting focus of her artistic attention makes me feel I know Una Watters more deeply this way than if I had actually met her.
Mary Morrissy’s fourth novel, Penelope Unbound, will be published by Banshee Press in 2023. A member of Aosdána, she is a journalist and teacher of creative writing.
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Emer O’Hanlon
In his New Yorker article ‘The Paper Tomb’, Benjamin Anastas recounts the thwarted literary career of Claude Fredericks (best known for inspiring the character of Julian Morrow, the beguiling Classics professor, in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.) An avid diarist between 1932 and 2012, Fredericks was convinced the journal would become his masterpiece when published. It didn’t because it never was published. Anastas is among only a few to wade through Fredericks’ many-thousand page archive (he’s barely scratched the surface), and admits, ‘some stray “jewels” were hidden inside [the pages], but in the main his millions of words are a monumental disappointment.’
It’s tempting to frame Fredericks as a misunderstood genius or a pompous self-deceiver; but these are both boring options. He had big ideas about what a diary could and should be, and yet in his own work, what should be the most interesting ‘living’ aspects of a diary are often executed either unaware or unsuccessfully. The diaries seem, unarguably, mediocre; and I find this comforting, even admirable. What do we do with the merely mediocre? That’s a question which challenges and fascinates me. What makes art worthwhile? How can you tell? How do you know when to stop?
I spent more time thinking about these diaries than anything else I read or watched this year. I know I don’t have the drive or resources to read them in enough depth to judge whether the project was worth it (for Fredericks or for me.) But doesn’t that make the story all the more compelling?
Emer O’Hanlon was the winner of the inaugural Stinging Fly/Felicity Bryan Associates Fiction Prize for her story ‘Diana in a lonely place’. Her fiction has also appeared in the Irish Times and Extra Teeth.
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Lisa Owens
I’ve admired Lydia Davis’s writing for many years, and keep a copy of her Collected Stories on my desk. She reminds me there are always new ways into things: her unexpected approaches turn the most mundane material into something complex and surprising. For a long time, though, her formal innovations and often dispassionate tone held me at a respectful distance. I considered her more a writer of the head than the heart.
Lately, while going through a difficult time, I found myself unable to read novels. Something about their scale or point of view kept emphasising how stuck I was in myself. Condemned instead to scrolling online, I came across Davis’s micro-story, ‘Head, Heart’. The first time I read it years ago, I’d been left a bit cold by its simplicity—it struck me as reductive and naive. But encountering it again from a place of crisis, I saw the story was in fact a tiny, precious gift: it perfectly understood the inevitability and ordinariness of sadness as well as its extraordinary intensity and reach.
I immediately returned to her other stories and was astonished to see myself everywhere: in a lost button, the girl who imagines a little man at night, the old woman whose house is falling down around her. It felt like magic that these words—which I’d already read!—were waiting there to come alive for me at just the right moment. One of Davis’s collections is called Varieties of Disturbance and I think this title gestures at what she does best: recognising that peace is a precarious state, but also that we are never truly alone in our disquiet.
Lisa Owens’s novel Not Working was published by Picador in 2016. She also writes short stories and screenplays, and lives in London. Her story ‘Chemistry Read’ was published here in September.
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Kevin Power
The work of art that made a significant impact on me in 2022? Oh, easy: that would be the ‘Sleepytime’ episode of Bluey. If you don’t know it, Bluey is an animated TV show for kids, produced by the ABC network in Australia and created by a guy called Joe Brumm, who writes most of the episodes. Bluey is a six-year-old Blue Heeler; her dad, Bandit, is also a Blue Heeler; her mum, Chilli, and her sister, Bingo, are Red Heelers. Nothing unusual happens to Bluey’s family. They do ordinary parent-and-child stuff. Holidays, birthday parties, trips to the dump. Brief shots throughout the series linger on quotidian items: flowers, birds, cars, chairs, tables. But the ordinariness of the family is only part of the point. Bluey is really about how we play: how we transform the world using our imaginations, as the best way to understand it. (What art does.)
Bandit and Chilli take their kids’ games with the utmost seriousness. They go into ‘dance mode’ crossing the street. They act like dinosaurs when touched with a ‘featherwand.’ They know that play teaches you the world, and makes it magical. Unlike every other kid’s TV show,Bluey is also about what it means to be a parent: how hard it is, how tiring, how filled with unspeakable joy. In ‘Sleepytime,’ Bingo promises to be a big girl and stay all night in her own bed. She dreams. Her dream mixes elements of two bedtime books: she is a chick, hatching from an egg that is the planet Earth; she sails through the cosmos with Floppy, her toy bunny. Dad is a blue planet. Mum is the Sun. The sun will always be there. But Bingo has to grow up. (The animation in this episode is gorgeous; the soundtrack remixes Holst’s ‘Jupiter,’ from The Planets.) Meanwhile the family members switch beds all night. Mum, half-asleep, gets Bluey a glass of water. Dad, also half-asleep, sings to Bluey as she sits on the toilet. Towards the very end of the episode, you see Bluey’s glass of water, sitting on her mum’s bedside locker. All of the care and toil of being a parent is in that image.
‘Sleepytime’ is seven minutes long. I only ever watch it when I’m alone. I can’t watch it with my kids, because I don’t want them to see me cry.
Kevin Power is the author of two novels, Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) and White City (2021), and a collection of criticism, The Written World (2022). He was commissioned to deliver our annual lecture at the Bray Literary Festival in October.
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Anne Tannam
A heavy book, the heft of it solid and comforting. It’s been sitting on my desk for the past seven months and most days I treat myself to a few pages. On the cover a hand-shaped cut-out of the American Woodland Indians, from the Middle Woodland period, 200B.C.C – 400 C.E. I place my left hand over the cut-out, palm to palm, feel the rush of connection, expansive, intimate.
I restrict myself to a diet of three archetypal images at a time.
Bear, Wolf, Coyote
Hammer, Plow, Wheel
Blessing, Disease, Wound
The Book of Symbols – Reflections On Archetypal Images (Taschen), winds its way through creation and cosmos, animal, plant, human and spirit worlds, image after image, accompanied by their cultural and historical context. In this book’s company, the world beyond the everyday reveals itself in light and shadow, holding the tension between them.
Blood, Liver, Womb
Ladder, Attic, Basement
Crack, Pearl, Grail
Today the book opens on page 486. Stranger – ‘the bearer of the new, as well as the destroyer of the old’ from the Old French estranger meaning ‘foreigner’ or ‘alien’. The Latin is hostis meaning both ‘guest’ and ‘host’. In Hebrew the word zar translates as stranger and is also the root for ‘border’.
On the opposite page, a half-hidden shadow figure stands in a portal, detail from The Birth of St. John the Baptist by Lica Signoretti (1441-1523), oil on panel, Italy.
Anne Tannam has published three poetry collections. The most recent one, Twenty-six Letters of an Alphabet, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2021.
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Frank Wynne
Two men, two artists, both named Asle, weave their way through the streets of Bjorgevin in Jon Fosse’s Septology, through chapters comprising a single, sinuous, supple yet graceful sentence filled with echoes and subtly shifting repetitions, at once limpid as water and nebulous as mist seen through a veil. Are they indeed two, on simply avatars of a singular life lived differently, of paths taken and not taken, passions kindled and spent, talents used and wasted? We cannot know—but most importantly: in the resplendent, all-encompassing whole, such prosaic details do not matter.
Every reader’s life is marked by books that move or stimulate, but it is rare indeed to come upon an author who reshapes the very nature of literature, who sculpts words and phrases it into something living, breathing, yet unlike anything experienced before. For me, Jon Fosse’s Septology is an epiphany—in both the religious and the secular meanings of the word. Through the shimmering meanders of the translation by Damion Searles, whose resonant realisation makes me both envious and grateful, I can glimpse the numinous in all things. Here is a novel about life, art, love, existence and God, one that eschews plot and incident for a suspended contemplation, yet one that is compulsively readable: a transcendent, hypnotic page-turner that affects real change in the reader—at least in this reader. To have encountered this novel (this writer and his translator) has been a privilege, and one I know I will return to many times in years to come.
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator, writer and editor. He has translated numerous French and Hispanic authors including Michel Houellebecq, Ahmadou Kourouma, Javier Cercas and Virginie Despentes. His work has earned him numerous awards, most recently the 2022 Dublin Literary Award for his translation of The Art of Losing. He was chair of the jury for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
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Read the earlier contributions to this series (from January 2022) here.