Multilingual Imaginations: Asymptote's Fifth Anniversary Celebration

Please join us for Asymptote’s fifth anniversary event in London, as we welcome three of the most exciting writers engaging in multilingual work.

Caroline Bergvall is a writer and artist of French-Norwegian background, based in London, working across art forms, media, and languages. Caroline is a strong exponent of writing methods adapted to contemporary audiovisual and multilingual and other contextual concerns. Her projects alternate between textual pieces, audioworks, visual textworks, installations, and live performances, often in collaboration. Her most recent output includes Drift (Nightboat, 2014), awarded a Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Poetry and Drama from the University of Cambridge. She is currently developing a project called Raga Dawn, an outdoors sunrise performance for vocal text (2016-2017). Her website is http://www.carolinebergvall.com/

Tena Štivičić's plays Can't Escape Sundays, At Deathbed, The Two of Us, Fragile!, Fireflies, Felix, Invisible, Europe, and plays for children, Perceval – the Quest for the Grail, and Psst have been performed in a number of European countries and translated and published in ten languages. They have won numerous awards including the European Authors Award and Innovation Award at Heidelberg Stueckemarkt for Fragile! and the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2015 for Three Winters, first performed at the National Theatre in London in 2014. Tena is also a columnist and screenwriter and writes in both English and Croatian.

Hamid Ismailov was born into a deeply religious Uzbek family of Mullahs and Khodjas living in Kyrgyzstan, many of whom had lost their lives during the Stalin era persecution. Yet he received an exemplary Soviet education, graduating with distinction from both his secondary school and military college, as well as attaining university degrees in a number of disciplines. Though he could have become a high-flying Soviet or post-Soviet apparatchik, instead his fate led him to become a dissident writer and poet residing in the West. He was the BBC World Service’s first Writer in Residence. Critics have compared his books to the best of Russian classics, Sufi parables and works of Western post-modernism. While his writing reflects all of these and many other strands, it is his unique intercultural experience that excites and draws the reader into his world.

The discussion will be chaired by Ros Schwartz, vice-chair of the Translators Association. Ros is a translator from French with over 70 titles to her name, including a new translation of St Exupéry's Le Petit Prince and seven Maigret novels for Penguin Classics’ new translations of George Simenon’s oeuvre. She is currently co-translating Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Sur ma mère with Lulu Norman.