Best of European Fiction 2010 @ EIBF

Review by Keir Hind | 24 Aug 2010

 

This event was based around one book, with multiple authors, The Best of European Fiction 2010. The book is a fantastic idea – it has contributions from one author per country, drawn from as many of the countries of Europe as possible. Obviously there’s some room for debate over what constitutes a country, but it seems to be an open field, since there are contributions from England, Wales and Scotland rather than just Great Britain. Scotland is represented in the book, and was represented at this event, by Alasdair Gray, and he was joined by Igor Stiks, from Bosnia, and Michal Witkowski, from Poland. Unfortunately Gray read first, because his rollicking style of reading was always going to be a hard act to follow, not least when English is not your first language. Michal Witkowski had a translator on stage with him too, which did mean his reading suffered even more by comparison. Still, it was enjoyable to see each author’s reactions to the other’s work (Stiks and Witkowski seemed to enjoy Gray’s reading as much as the audience did) and the event didn’t gloss over the difficulties presented by translation. The issue was explored in discussion, but there just wasn’t enough time to go into depth about it in what was always going to be a crowded event. [Keir Hind]

 

The Best of European Fiction 2010 event was on at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 Aug.

The book itself is out now, published by Dalkey Archive Press, cover price £11.99.