This September 2009 Ludmila Ulitskaya will be a special guest of Babel Fest in Bellinzona, the capital city of the canton Ticino in Switzerland.
On Saturday, Sept. 19th, at 16.00 at Teatro Sociale Ludmila Ulitskaya and Emanuela Guercetti («Russia - Italia. Attraverso i Secoli» 2007 award for Italian translation of Ulitskaya's Sincerely Yours, Shurik) will host a public discussion.
Also, during the Festival Emanuela Guercetti (http://www.guercetti.it/) will give a three-day translation workshop based on her Ulitskaya's Italian translations.
Featured titles
LEAD ME, BLIND MAN, a novel by Vladislav Otroshenko (2007)
Rights sold: Russia – Culturnaya Revolutzia, AST
A biopic novel dedicated to the famous Russian playwright Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903). A rich aristocrat who often travelled, Sukhovo-Kobylin was arrested, prosecuted and tried for seven years in Russia for the murder of his French mistress Louise-Simone Dimanche, a crime of which he is nowadays generally believed to have been innocent. Based on his personal experiences, Sukhovo-Kobylin wrote a trilogy of satirical plays about the prevalence of bribery and other corrupt practices in the Russian judicial system of the time.
Read moreThe Witness, a novel by Ilya Mitrofanov (1993)
Rights sold: Germany - Volk und Welt, Italy - Isbn Edizioni, Spain - Lumen, Poland - Claroscuro
"This novel is intensely passionate, and rich in fresh images and patterns..." (Silvia Bambino, The Wanity Fair)
"The Witness" is the first-person narrative of the life story of a simple human being, a barber Fedor Petrovich, whose life's most intense and dramatic period was the incorporation of his native Bessarabia into the Soviet Union in 1940, accompanied by coercion from the new command structure, which affected social relationships and caused enormous suffering due to famine brought on both by prolonged drought and by mistakes in official planning and preparation.
In the speck on the map called Kotlovina, the entire historical drama, starting with the so-called Soviet liberation from Romanian rule, was played out to its horrible end with very few survivors to live and tell about it.