In May Sjón will be in AUSTRALIA as a guest of the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne and the Sidney Writer’s Festival.
On the 14th he will be in Melbourne and share the stage with Roddy Doyle as a part of the “10–Ten Writers, Five Double Bill” series: See here.
In Sidney he will take part in different events, among them a discussion about his work in different fields on the 17th and a panel discussion on myths, with American novelist Jesmyn Ward, on the 19th.
STOP THE PRESS! ”From the Mouth of the Whale” has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012!
The £10.000 prize is divided between author and translator, in this case Sjón and the marvelous Victoria Cribb, should they be lucky. This year six books translated from German, Icelandic, Chinese, Hebrew and Italian are nominated, among them are Umberto Eco’s “The Prague Cemetary” and Yan Lianke’s ”Dream of Ding Village”. See the whole list of nominations here.
“The Whispering Muse” (Argóarflísin) will be published on the 11th of June by Telegram Books in the UK. In his kind endorsement of the book the novelist David Mitchell says:
“THE WHISPERING MUSE is a quirky, melodic, ticklish, seamlessly-translated, lovingly-polished gem of a novel. Sjón’s work deserves space on any self-respecting bookshelf of European fiction.” (Order it here.)
“Something strange and wonderful has washed up on our shores for these long winter’s nights.”
So begins a splendid review about “From the Mouth of the Whale” in the Washington Post.
British Kashmiri author Hari Kunzru names “From the Mouth of the Whale” as his book of the year in an interview with the Booktrust
Read the whole interview with Hari about his own great novel “Gods Without Men”, aliens, deserts and gods in search of humans on the Booktrust’s website.
“A macskaróka” – as “Skugga-Baldur” is called in Hungarian – is chosen by a jury of literary critics as the fourth most interesting new translation published in Hungary in 2011.
If your skills in the Hungarian language allow you can read all about it in the online version of the current affairs magazine Magyar Narancs.
“From the Mouth of the Whale” is a fascinating, unsettling experience and Victoria Cribb is to be commended for capturing the author’s unique voice in her English translation
Or so it says in a glowing review of both book and translation in Publishing Perspectives.
“From the Mouth of the Whale” is one of The Scotsman’s Books of the Year, chosen by Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh Book Festival
“Wild, hallucinatory and bleak, From the Mouth of the Whale, by Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón, is one of the most captivating and challenging books I read this year.” More in The Scotsman.
The foreign rights of “The Blue Fox” (Skugga-Baldur) are sold to China.
One of China’s biggest publishing house of foreign fiction, Yilin Press in Beijing, has aquired the rights to publish Sjón’s award winning novel in Chinese.
“From the Mouth of the Whale” is reviewed in the Publishers Weekly
According to the Publishers Weekly “From the Mouth of the Whale” is “a blithe, rhapsodic novel [...] a work charged with lyrical energy and metaphysical purpose”.
THE FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR
Sjón took part in diverse events at the Frankfurt Book Fair between
the 13th and 16th of October as Iceland was this year’s guest country of honor.
“Ásgerður Júníusdóttir and Sjón in der Blaue Sofa”
Interview on the ZDF about “Das Gleißen der Nacht”, poetic farmers and other things Icelandic, crowned with Ásgerður singing “Draumalandið” and “Litla flugan”.
“Icelandic Author Sjón on Myths and Crackpot Theories”
A Book Fair interview with the international trade magazine Publishing Perspectives.