Would you like us to share information about your event? Email info@tiltedaxispress.com and we'll add it to the list!
Taking place this May in London, Birmingham and Liverpool, a first ever Vietnamese Film Festival! Organised by the amazing Cường Minh Bá Phạm, Esther Johnson, and Tuyết Vân Huỳnh <3
Subscribe now to support Tilted Axis’s mission to shake up contemporary international literature.
Join Good Book Club this month for an online discussion of dd’s Umbrella! Free to join :)
Join us to celebrate the long-awaited launch of A Book, Untitled on Instagram Live. At once electric and ephemeral, A Book, Untitled is a story of re-cognition otherwise– posthumous, imagined and intricately powerful.
Catch Yu Miri at Southbank Centre this Sunday! This is part of the London Literary Festival.
Join us with Yu Miri and Morgan Giles at Blackwell’s Manchester for a The End of August book launch!
Tickets are £3.00 or free when pre-ordering a copy of the book, more copies will also be available for purchase at the event.
Catch Yu Miri and Morgan Giles at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival!
Our publisher Kristen Alfaro will be speaking at this year’s PEN International Translation Day in London. She will be on a panel of small and big publishers to discuss all things translation, chaired by Preti Taneja.
Join us for an intimate and celebratory joint launch of two seminal works of Dalit feminist literature during a highly anticipated Live Stream. The event is free, just need to sign up!
Join us at our last event for ‘Love In The Big City’ book tour! Our last stop will be at Korean Cultural Centre.
Our stop today day is at Bookhaus in Bristol. Join us with Anton Hur and Sang-Young Park who will be in conversation with Tice Cin for this event! Come for some laughter, some tears and lots of love :)
Sign up here
Our Love In The Big City summer book tour officially kicks start today! Join us with translator Anton Hur and author Sang Young Park at our first stop: Libreria, London.
Welcome to the second and last day of our first gathering!
Click to find out the schedule for today :)
For the first gathering, Tilted Axis Press (UK) and soi squad (Thailand) are co-hosting writers, translators, publishers, and institutional workers from Southeast Asia in Bangkok, during 24-25 June 2023 to share conversations, solutions, and possible collaborations.
Click to find out the schedule for June 24
Please join us next Tuesday for Indie Book Week at Bookhaus in Bristol with Polly Barton and Kavita Bhanot!
Sing up here :)
Four of the world's leading literary translators discuss readership, translation and the myth of the English reader. Anton Hur, Sawad Hussein, Yarri Kamara, Sandra Tamele.
Wed, 31 May 2023 14:00 - 17:00 BST ONLINE
Please join us for a panel discussion with translators and writer Sawad Hussain and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, contributors to the recently published book Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation, an anthology edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, published by Tilted Axis Press. There will be refreshments and copies of Violent Phenomena will be available for purchase with discounts for students.
The Parameters of Our Stories is a literary forum where writers, translators, publishers, readers, and policy makers exchange thoughts on prevailing issues within the ecosystem of knowledge production. This initiative sets its long-term goal to encourage further collaborations within the region and beyond, and to promote literary works from Southeast Asia as ‘world literature’ while simultaneously challenging how parameters of such genre are gauged.
Kalyani Thakur Charal is a Dalit feminist poet writing in the Bengali language. She has published four volumes of poetry, a collection of critical essays, a collection of short stories, and an autobiography. She edits the Dalit women’s magazine Neer, is on the board of a publishing house focusing solely on Dalit writers, and on the Dalit Sahitya Akademi. She recently edited Dalit Lekhika: Women’s Writing from Bengal. Kalyani’s vision of social justice, democracy and equality is inspiring and powerful.
Join her for poetry and readings from her novel Andhar Bil, and a discussion about her activist and editorial work. Tilted Axis Press will publish I Belong to Nowhere: Poems of Hope and Resistance, translated by Mrinmoy Pramanick and Sipra Mukherjee on 30 March 2023.
For more information: ar75@soas.ac.uk
CADALFEST (Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival), a collaboration with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre, concludes this February with an event with Bengali Dalit writer, Kalyani Thakur Charal. Kalyani’s vision of social justice, democracy and equality is inspiring and powerful. Join her for poetry and readings from her novel Andhar Bil, and a discussion about her activist and editorial work.
All welcome. Find out more and book your free ticket here.
Sema Kaygusuz, a leading writer of contemporary Turkish literature and English PEN writer-in-residence, will discuss her impressive career and writing journey ahead of the publication of Kurdistan + 100 (Comma Press, March 2023), the first anthology of Kurdish science fiction ever collected and published in the UK, to which Sema is a contributor.
Her published works include the novels Yüzünde Bir Yer (Every Fire you Tend), which was inspired by her own grandmother and deals with the feelings of shame and guilt experienced by someone who survives a massacre, andYere Düşen Dualar (Wine and Gold), and the short story collection Doyma Noktasi (Saturation Point). Her writing touches on the themes of memory and heritage, historical silence, women in society, engaging with the past and imagining the future.
The event will be in English and will end with an opportunity for audience questions and a book sale/signing. Ticket-holders are warmly invited to join us for a drinks reception after the event.
This event is delivered by English PEN in partnership with Comma Press and Tilted Axis Press. Ticket holders will also be able to buy a discounted copy Kurdistan + 100 once it is published in March 2023.
Donation. Please register here.
About Sema Kaygusuz
Sema Kaygusuz is one of Turkey’s leading contemporary writers. Her debut novel, Yere Düsen Dualar (Wine and Gold) won international recognition upon publication in 2006. In 2007, she wrote the screenplay for Yeşim Ustaoğlu's film Pandora'nın Kutusu (Pandora’s Box), which won the Golden Shell at the 2008 International Film Festival in San Sebastian. She is the author of the short story collections Ortadan Yarısından (In the Middle of the Half), Sandık Lekesi (Box Stain) and Doyma Noktası (Saturation Point), which established Sema Kaygusuz as a distinctive voice in the canon of young Turkish literature in the new millennium. Her novels The Well of Trapped Words (translated by Maureen Freely and published by Comma Press) and Yüzünde Bir Yer (translated by Nicholas Glastonbury and published in English by Tilted Axis as Every Fire You Tend) were also awarded PEN Translates grants. Kaygusuz is a recipient of both the Cevdet-Kudret-Literature Award and the France-Turquie Literary Award. In 2016 she was named laureate of the prestigious German Friedrich Rückert Prize.
Join us for a reading, Q&A, and book signing with author Thuận and publisher Tilted Axis Press, to mark the publication of the English translation of Chinatown, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý.
The event will be moderated by second-year SELCS student Ann Nguyen (BA Language and Culture) and is organised in collaboration with UCL’s Comparative Literature programmes.
Free to attend, but please register here.
Join Tilted Axis Press for a special Lunar New Year celebration at TANK GPS!
In partnership with the ESEA Publishing Network and featuring readings and conversation from award-winning writers Yan Ge and Pear Nuallak, moderated by poet Kwan Ann Tan. Music, discounted book bundles and drinks - come and celebrate the year of the rabbit with your favourite anti-imperial, indie press ✌
Sold out 🐇
Hey reading folks. It's that time of year for the Tilted Axis festive sale! Head to our website and enter the code DEC22 for all our titles, in print and for ebooks. You can also use the code to pre-order upcoming titles: https://tiltedaxispress.com/books 🎁
Gain insight and advice on the ins and outs of publishing translated or Asian literature from the publisher of Tilted Axis Press.
In the UK translated literature is a growing market, however, European literatures remain the most translated in the industry. How can publishers, writers and translators from Southeast Asia disrupt the market?
Kristen Vida Alfaro from Tilted Axis Press will share insight, advice and experience on publishing translated literature. What are the challenges small presses face? How can emerging writers develop relationships with publishers? What constitutes the labour of translation?
Emerging writers and translators of Southeast Asian languages will gain insight into the process and challenges of publishing. Translators will also learn more about rights and resources that can help navigate the industry.
(Best for emerging translators and writers interested in getting their works translated into English.)
Tickets: $6.20, available via eventbrite. Venue: Goodman Arts Centre 90 Goodman Road Block E, #03-32, Singapore Book Council Training Room *Please note that there is no lift access to the Training Room Singapore, 439053 Singapore
The George Town Literary Festival is an international literary festival celebrating world literature, translations and literary arts. Held annually in the UNESCO World Heritage site of George Town, Penang, the festival was awarded ‘The International Excellence Awards 2018 for Literary Festival’.
The GTLF is an initiative by the State Government of Penang and remains one of the few free festivals open to the public. Since its first edition in 2011 with only five writers, the GTLF has grown to become Malaysia’s largest literary festival and one of the best literary festivals in the world.
Join Tilted Axis at the following panels:
25th November, 11: 30AM- 12:30pm. Venue: Bangunan UAB - Multipurpose Hall (1st Floor)
Decolonising the Culture Industry with Bilal Tanweer, Kristen Vida Alfaro, Nadira Ilana, Ivor Indyk. Moderator: Nithiya Muthusamy
The power structures of the culture industry are entrenched in paradigms of imbalance and underrepresentation. Shaped by the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, and driven by the machinery of commercialism, cultural production prioritises accessibility and marketability for mainstream audiences. How can writers, translators, publishers and filmmakers disrupt these hegemonic forces and affirm a polyphony of voices in a reimagined cultural landscape?
25th November, 11:30AM -12:30PM. Venue: Digital Penang - Event Hall
Untamed tongues: the translator as shaman and rebel with Daisy Rockwell, Anton Hur, Nguyen An Ly. Moderator: Adriana Nordin Manan
Literary translators are shamans of meaning and essence, inviting readers to uncharted realms of experience. At the same time, translators are rebels by nature — subverting conventional codes of language and introducing the unfamiliar into our vocabularies of literature. We speak to three masterful translators on the wild interplay and tensions of these two impulses — to render a text understandable and enjoyable in another language while challenging the limitations of language itself.
26th November, 10-11AM. Venue: Bangunan UAB - Multipurpose Hall (1st Floor)
Writing as Wilderness and Freedom by Geetanjali Shree
Celebrated author and 2022 International Booker Prize Winner, Geetanjali Shree, reflects on writing as an act of freedom, on the wilderness of inner and outer journeys, the writer's imagination, and the writing in one's mother tongue.
26th November, 5:30-6:30 PM Venue: Victoria Garden, Event Hall
In Your Wildest Dreams and Nightmares with Nguyen An Ly, Saqina Latif, Tan Jit Seng, Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Moderater: Tehmina Kaoosji
What keeps writers up all night? What would you dream if you were granted a dream that would come true? What is the most terrifying nightmare you’ve ever had? This conversation explores how dreams and subconscious longings shape our creative life. It invites us to dream and imagine beyond the limits of the permissible and possible.
27th November, 11AM-12PM. Venue: Bangunan UAB - Multipurpose Hall (1st Floor)
Tomb of Sand: Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell in conversation with Ann Lee
In this special session, Dr. Ann Lee speaks to the formidable writer-translator duo Geetanjali Shree & Daisy Rockwell, winners of the 2022 International Booker Prize. The conversation will focus on Geetanjali’s Shree’s masterpiece Tomb of Sand, the first book written in Hindi to receive the accolade. Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.
27th November, 1:30-2:30PM. Venue: Bangunan UAB - Multipurpose Hall (1st Floor)
Publishing Southeast Asia with Nora Nazerene Abu Bakar, Kristen Vida Alfaro, Ng Kah Gay. Moderator: Kam Raslan
The literatures of Southeast Asia are as complex and varied as its people and topographies. Yet writing from Southeast Asia is largely overlooked by international commercial publishers, who tend to view Southeast Asia as exotic backdrop for neo-colonial adventures or lesser cultural outposts of China and India. This panel features three publishers breaking new ground by publishing Southeast Asian literature on its own terms for international readership — Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, Tilted Axis Press, and Ethos Books.
ABOUT THIS EVENT
A special screening of Ningwasum by Subash Thebe Limbu followed by an in-conversation with Subash, Nicole Thiara and Joshua Lockwood-Moran.
Ningwasum is a Yakthung science fiction documentary film work narrated by Miksam, a time traveller from a future Indigenous Nation. The film follows two time travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, played by Subin Limbu and Shanta Nepali respectively, in the Himalayas weaving indigenous folk stories, culture, climate change and science fiction. The film explores notions of time, space and memory, and how realities and the sense of now could be different for different communities.
Drawing from Adivasi Futurism and inspired by Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, Ningwasum imagines a future from an Indigenous perspective where they have agency, technology, sovereignty and also their indigenous knowledge, culture, ethics and storytelling still intact.
The event will take place online on YouTube. The film is 45 minutes long, and the in-conversation will take place directly after the screening.
The Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) is the first international festival series dedicated to the writing and performance arts by writers whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India: Dalit Adivasi Text.
This event as part of the festival series in collaboration with Formations and Bonington Gallery.
Comma Press are delighted to invite new and emerging writers to this year's annual National Creative Writing a full day of events for aspiring writers to gain insight into the publishing industry and advice on how to excel in their practice with a keynote lecture from Vanessa Onwuemezi.
This special conference hosts a full day of events for aspiring writers to gain insight into the publishing industry and advice on how to excel in their practice. The event will run from 9.30am-5pm on Saturday 19th November, and will offer a keynote speech from a prominent author, two panel discussions, a bespoke synopsis writing workshop ran by The Literary Consultancy as well as two 1:1 sessions with an agent per attendee, and a choice of two workshops.
In addition to Vanessa Onwuemezi's keynote speech, there will be two panel discussions – one on the pitching and publishing process, and another special panel on writing through the climate crisis.
There will also be a variety of workshops that attendees can choose from, ranging from topics on marketing yourself as a writer and editing your manuscript, to genre workshops on poetry and nature writing.
All day tickets £65 (discount price: £32.50), book via eventbrite. Please get in touch with Nia at nia.thomas@commapress.co.uk if you are a writer from an underrepresented background.
The panel ‘Translation in Southeast Asia: Practices, Politics, and Prospects’—part of the Kritika Kultura reading series—aims to discuss key issues in literary translation in the region, particularly in the Philippines and Indonesia. The event will cover areas such as, but not limited to, the aesthetics and politics of translation, the protocols that inform the selection of texts to be translated, and the processes that facilitate the production and circulation of translations. The event will feature Kristen Vida Alfaro, Kristian Sendon Cordero, Kristine Ong Muslim, Junley L. Lazaga, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and Tiffany Tsao; discussions will be moderated by Allan Derain.
The event is co-sponsored by the National Book Development Board (NBDB), Book Development Association of the Philippines (BDAP), and the Book Institute of the Philippines, with support from Plume.
3-5PM (PHT [UTC + 8]) Onsite venue: Ching Tan Room (Som 111) Ateneo de Manila/ Online via zoom and the Kritika Kulture Facebook page.
Please register by 14 November 2022, Monday:
THE WORD FACTORY NEW STORY FESTIVAL PRESENTS:
The Strangeness of the Everyday
Enjoy an evening of inspiring reading and conversation with four of the strongest new voices in the world of short story writing: Ruby Cowling, Yan Ge and Ben Pester, hosted by Word Factory's Tom Conaghan, the publisher of the innovative Scratch short story books.
All three writers are known for their use of innovative forms to explore the wonderful and mundane in the everyday world.
Ruby Cowling
Ruby Cowling grew up in Bradford and lives in London. Her short fiction has won The White Review Short Story Prize and the London Short Story Prize among other awards, and has been published in magazines including Lighthouse and The Lonely Crowd. Her collection This Paradise (Boiler House Press, 2019) was longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and shortlisted for the 2020 Edge Hill Prize.
Ben Pester
Ben Pester's short story collection Am I in the Right Place? was published in 2021 by Boiler House Press, and was long listed for the 2022 Edge Hill Prize. His work has appeared in The London Magazine, Granta, Hotel, Five Dials and elsewhere.
Yan Ge
Yan Ge (颜歌) was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of thirteen books in Chinese, including five novels. She has received numerous awards and was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. The English translation of her latest novel The Chilli Bean Paste Clan was published in 2018. Another translated novel, Strange Beasts of China, was published in 2020/2021; both won English PEN Translates Awards. She was on the judging panel of the International Dublin Literary Award 2019. In 2021, she was on the final selection panel for the Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her English language debut short story collection Elsewhere will be published by Faber in the UK and Scribner in the USA in spring 2023, followed by a novel Hotel Destination. Yan lives in Norwich with her husband and son.
Tickets cost £15 and are available via eventbrite.
Thuận joins the OzAsia Festival live from Paris to discuss Chinatown, an unfinished love story, a virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora (The New Yorker).
This session will be held in Vietnamese with English interpretation. Moderator: Sheila Ngoc Pham
Free entry, no booking required.
Gogu Shyamala will discuss her literary and academic work to mark the republication of her short story collection Father May be an Elephant, and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…, by Tilted Axis Press in March 2022. Her focus on the perspective of Dalit women and children as well as her stories’ celebration of Dalit strength and culture will be explored. Gogu Shyamala will tell us about her choice of, and experimentation with, the short story form, and how she sees her role as writer, academic and activist. We will also discuss land relations and the link to caste, sexual violence, inter-caste love and other key concerns of her fiction and academic writing.
Gogu Shyamala will be in conversation with Sowjanya Tamalapakula, Bethan Evans, Judith Misrahi-Barak and Nicole Thiara and the session will conclude with Q&A with the online audience via YouTube chat.
Free, but reservation required.
