Granta winner: The winner of this year's Granta Best Young British Novelist, Evie Wyld, will meet Vietnamese readers and talk about the next generation of British writers later this week. Her visit to Viet Nam is part of the European Literature Days event. — File Photo

HA NOI (VNS)— The winner of this year's Granta Best Young British Novelist, Evie Wyld, will meet Vietnamese readers and talk about the next generation of British writers later this week.

Her visit forms part of the European Literature Days festival that will start on Friday in Ha Noi. She will give a talk on British contemporary literature at the Literature Department of the Ha Noi University of Social Sciences and Humanities. Later she will give a presentation on her latest book together with upcoming Vietnamese writer Di Li at the Goethe Institute.

The author of the acclaimed novel After the Fire, A Still Small Voice will also join Spanish writer and photographer Ruben Abella, Danish writer Sally Altschuler, and Vietnamese writers Ha Thuy Nguyen and Vo Thi Hao for a round table discussion themed ‘Writing Fiction Today – The Creating Process' at the institute on Saturday at 5pm.

Other events

Anyone interested in Italian literature is invited to a talk on Friday at Casa Italia by Italian Ambassador Lorenzo Angeloni, who is also a writer and an essayist. His lecture will focus on the essence of literature in the Western world and its distinctive ways of seeing people and exploring their relationship with reality.

Two short novels by Italo Calvino, including The Cloven Viscount and The Nonexistent Knight, published by Nha Nam Publishing House, will be presented to audiences at the event.

Friday will also be Kafka Night at the Goethe Institute, with fans coming to support the life of the German writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and his literary works, which mostly present the vivid psychological conflicts, fears and nightmares that exist inside everyone.

The night also introduces two of his well-known novels, Brief an den Vater (A Letter to My Father) and Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens (It's a Wonderful Life).

The European Literature Days will run for three days, and will also feature presentations of books from Denmark, France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium and Poland recently translated into Vietnamese. The events will take place at the Goethe Institute and L'Espace. Like last year, a special focus will be put on books aimed at children and young readers.

Denmark will introduce the children's series Stories in Luc Buc Town by writer Sally Altschuler and illustrator Tove Krebs Lange, while Switzerland will present readers to the popular story of their hero Wilhelm Tell in a fresh way. Poland has chosen the teenage novel Miss Nobody by Tomek Tryma and France is represented by the classic The Little Prince and a series of non-fiction books for young readers.

Belgium literature will be presented through the theatre piece La Balade du Grand Macabre (The Walk of the Death) – an adaptation of the famous classic by Michel de Gholderode. It will be performed by students of the Ha Noi Universityat L'Espace on Saturday at 8pm.

The awards ceremony of the German-Vietnamese Translation Competition will be held on Friday night at the Goethe Institute. Launched in the beginning of this year, the competition required competitors aged 35 or under to translate a text extract from the original German novel Adam und Evelyn by Ingo Schulze into Vietnamese.

The winner will receive a four-week German-language course in Germany and will join the translation team working on the full Vietnamese translation of the novel, which is due to be published by the Nha Nam Publishing House this autumn.

The European Literature Days are hosted by the European Union National Institute For Culture, with the aim of presenting literature from Europe to Vietnamese audiences. — VNS