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Gala Literary Hosts

October 2022

Top row: Literary hosts Kirmen Uribe, Megha Majumdar, Yuri Herrera, and Rivka Galchen / Bottom...

Read essays, translations, and recommendations from the Words Without Borders archive by some of the literary hosts who will join us for the 2022 Words Without Borders gala on October 25.

Doors, Windows, and the Office of Foreign Assets Control
By Esther Allen
Lex and I came to the strange realization that we, and Alejo Carpentier, had effectively been censored by the United States government.
A Berlin Diary, in Memory of September 11
By Susan Bernofsky
I spent the academic year 2001–2 in Berlin.  This was a year bracketed by tragedies that took place in my absence—one huge and life-changing for millions of people, one small and life-changing…
A Holiday Gift Guide for Children’s Literature in Translation
By Rivka Galchen
In the past, I often felt lost buying books for the kids of friends and families. Goodnight, Moon may be inexhaustibly good, but everyone already has it; same with The Phantom Tollbooth; same with…
House Taken Over
By Yuri Herrera
The house knew how to determine what was important.
Translated from Spanish by Lisa M. Dillman
Multilingual
Troublesome Love
By Elena Ferrante
Once he was certain that a man in the crowd had touched her. In front of everyone he hit her.
Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
Deceptive Simplicity: International Children’s Literature
By Daniel Hahn
I often feel that adults forget what children’s stories are capable of.
International YA, Dec. 10 at NYPL: A Reading List from the Panelists
By Megha Majumdar
Most of us came to books as young readers. Working on our current issue of international Young Adult literature, we were reminded of the joy of those early literary encounters. In many ways this December…
From “Um País”
By Flávia Rocha
How to explain / the heat a language exhales
Translated from Portuguese by Idra Novey
MultimediaMultilingual
The Tofu-Maker
By Shen Fuyu
Around the time we were in second grade, Buckethead and I beat a snake to death.
Translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
Berriozabaleta Fountain, Elorrio, Spain
Joxe Aranzabal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Household Matters
By Kirmen Uribe
Grandma Susana wore long skirts, and she even drank vinegar to make her face paler, as a mortification of her beauty.
Translated from Basque by Elizabeth Macklin