On Wednesday, March 27th, The Common will host a virtual celebration that highlights emerging talents during their 2024 Festival of Debut Authors. You can learn more about the festival and register for the event here.
Debutiful caught up with five of the writers appearing at the virtual event so readers could get to know them a little better. Enjoy this round table with the emerging poets, prose writers, and translators who are ready to make their mark on the literary world.
Participating in the roundtable is:
- Felice Belle (author of the debut poetry collection Viscera)
- Amika Elfendi (writer, artist, and translator)
- Jordan Escobar (author of the chapbook Men With the Throats of Birds)
- Irina Hrinoschi (writer, filmmaker, poet and translator working in English, German and Romanian)
- Nina Perrotta (translator of Clara Alves’s London on My Mind)
- Shanna Tan (translator of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum)
You can learn more about each author by clicking their names, which will take you to their websites.
Register for the March 27th virtual event, which starts at 7pm ET, here!
A short version of your official bio was listed above, but I’m curious about your unofficial bio. Who is the person outside of the writer?
FB: Felice Belle is going to close a karaoke set with “When You Were Young” by The Killers, nine times out of ten.
AE: I was born and raised in Syria, in my teeny tiny hometown Mothbeen – a place with buried treasures & an endless stream of rumours. My mum was a graceful presence at home, and at school (yes, she was my English teacher in secondary); my father worked abroad for 10/11 months at a time to provide a decent level of living for the family of 4 children.
As a kid, I was bright, promising with almost perfect marks every year. But, at some point towards adulthood, I ventured into the study of medicine, & I fell through the roof. Then, the revolution (later morphed into civil war) broke out. Like many others from my region of Horan, I got kidnapped by the regim*e within the first year of troubles (2011). Once, & then another time in 2013: on my birthday, actually. I don’t think my family & I ever talked the trauma through. So, yeah, in 2013, there came a time where I had to leave, fly to a safer nest – but that nest proved to be brittle & thorny, & almost just as turbulent for a Syrian like myself as my bereaved homeland. Then, a year & a half later, I crossed the Mediterranean without a life vest.
This year of maximum global calamity, I’ve been grappling with the aftermath of a destructive bout of mental breakdown (not yet sure what that was exactly, though), being in Palestine on 7 Oct 2023, & a bit of homelessness, etc.
Still, I’ve had a myriad of good & heartfelt lived moments in my life. The big picture can sometimes overshadow & belie.
JE: Jordan Escobar loves spending time outside and has worked as a grape grower, almond rancher, beekeeper, longshoreman, goat herder, oyster farmer, horse wrangler and zookeeper.
IH: I am a cat person (who loves dogs too), prone to migraines, love the sea, some moderate hedonism and a lot of walks. So really just a walking, talking writer cliché. I’m a Gemini and a Prince fan. I love musical theater and all things 90 Day Fiancé. And I think I’m a detective based on the sheer number of Law & Order episodes I’ve watched.
NP: Like most writers and translators, I love reading—recent favorites include Identitti by Mithu Sanyal, translated by Alta Price; Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; and Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel. For the past few years, I’ve lived in Oregon, and have loved exploring the nearby coast, mountains, and old-growth forests (not to mention the natural hot springs). Other hobbies include ceramics, biking, and watching Premier League soccer.
ST: Shanna spends all her free time learning Thai and watching way too many Thai dramas.
How did writing become part of your life?
FB: About ten years ago, my mother gave me a notebook of poems she’d written from 1968 to 1984. So writing is in my DNA. I also come from the theater. In college I’d perform poems as monologues—”Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou and “Ego Tripping” by Nikki Giovanni, to name a few. Inhabiting the words of other writers inspired me to use my own.
AE: I started out with writing teenage articles – which I always kept for myself – where I tried justifying the existence of the world through god & vice versa. Then I moved on to writing poetry about romantic interests, my love for my mama, &, after a while, atrocities I experienced or heard of in Syria back in the early days of the revolution.
JE: I was working as a goat rancher, managing a herd of about 30,000 goats, and discretely writing poems on pads of paper during moments between driving tractors and swinging lassos. I was encouraged by mentor to begin taking poetry more seriously, which ultimately led to me leaving behind the farm life, in exchange for something a little bit less smelly.
IH: I think of my pathway to writing like a crepe cake – layer after layer makes the whole. The first “crepe”: my childhood, when my grandparents read to me extensively. I also listened to loads of old vinyl audiobooks. Most of the authors who were being read to me had an acerbic, absurdist type of humor: Ion Creangă’s Ivan Turbincă, a soldier who cheats heaven and hell and becomes immortal, Ilf, Petrov, Zoshchenko and Romanov, short story writers satirizing life in the Soviet Union, Ion Luca Caragiale’s theatre sketches skewering Romania’s petty bourgeois and Jaroslav Hasek’s, “The Brave Soldier Svejk”, a soldier desperately and hilariously trying to avoid being drafted. The second layer was when I started choosing my readings. Much of it was anglophone literature: Roald Dahl’s children’s books, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Brontë sisters, Tennessee Williams. The third “crepe” came when I moved to Germany as a teenager and discovered germanophone writers and poets: Kurt Tucholsky, Stefan Zweig, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan.
I think, over time, I felt as though there’s an imaginary place where all these authors hang out, speak to each other in their different languages and laugh at each other’s jokes. And the idea was to join the conversation, which meant starting to write myself.
I wrote in Romanian and English first, then in German, then back to English. I’ve abandoned trying to identify with one language and decided that what’s more important is the act of writing. Right now I’m writing in English, but that might change in the future.
NP: I stumbled into translation in college, when I realized that it combined all the things I most enjoyed: literature, writing, and foreign languages. Ever since then, I’ve been translating in my free time—usually short stories, though my first full-length translation, of Brazilian novelist Clara Alves’s London on My Mind, will be out this June. Since 2019, my work at Words Without Borders, a digital magazine of literature in translation, has also kept me immersed in the field and introduced me to a number of other early-career translators.
ST: Right now, I’m focusing on literary translation, and it came into my life because of my love for language learning. I started self-studying Korean fifteen years ago, and I fell in love with Korean literature as I picked up the language. It was then that I started thinking about wanting to translate Korean literature one day.
What do you want to explore with your writing?
FB: I’m obsessed with contradiction. Want vs. need. How it happened vs. how you remember it. Life has a way of testing your belief systems. And I’m interested in what happens when the thing—the person, the place, the ideal—you believed in is no longer true. What do you make of the discrepancy? How do you recover and rebuild with some new truth?
AE: Loneliness, paranoia, identity crises, migration, childhood & war trauma, & the humour in all of it (whenever there is room left for the latter). There seems to be quite a burdensome amount of loss in my writing.
JE: I like to explore the intersection of food production, our relation to land, and the subjugation and marginalization of individuals in the extraction of resources. More specifically, I interrogate the U.S. agriculture system which seems to exploit immigrant labor while simultaneously neglecting the very people that the country depends on. I try to humanize these people with my experiences and encounters working for a number of years as an ag laborer.
IH: I’m not sure what I really want to explore and I think we’re often revealed to ourselves after the fact. My short stories in the past, as well as my non-fiction piece in The Common have dealt with political violence, transgenerational trauma, gender and injustice, really. There are so many injustices around the world which are never repaired, the victims never reimbursed, no reparations paid. In my own small way, I keep score and try to keep some of these stories alive.
NP: As a translator, I’m interested in bringing English-language readers stories and perspectives they might not otherwise encounter. The translation I published in The Common, of a short story by Mario Martz, is a good example: the protagonist, a thirty-something Nicaraguan man, feels adrift following the dissolution of his marriage. He befriends a Chinese couple who have moved into his former home and who are dealing with a loss of their own. I love translating fiction that evokes a specific sense of place, as Martz’s does; I also tend to seek out work with a strong narrative voice and/or sense of humor, and writing by and about women.
ST: I would like to bring more Korean and Mandarin Chinese novels to English readers. I have a soft spot for stories with a strong sense of place, and genre-wise, I’d like to translate a psychological thriller one day. I want to work on horror fiction too.
More specifically, what project is next for you?
FB: An animated short, (a revision of) an old play, and a new book poetry.
AE: I have been working on a semi-autobiographical novel in Norwegian ever since 2019. That on its own should say quite a bit about my completion skills. In my defence, life has been a bunch of hectic ebbs & flows in recent years. Also, procrastination is a filthy predator.
Last year, I started toying with & toiling at a trilingual trilogy of poetry booklets, where I explore themes that pertain to a new world order, Mesopotamian gods, & me within the rift we’ve been witnessing in humanity for the last two/three decades.
JE: My next project entails a full-length poetry collection that explores these intersections as well personal reflections on love, labor, and loss.
IH: I’m now working on a collection of poetry translations, from Romanian to English, of two incredible Moldovan poets, Leonida Lari and Leonard Țuchilatu. It’s a collaboration with Romana Iorga, who is a poet and translator. I love working in duos, so it’s been a great process.
I’ve also been experimenting with video poems, which I find fascinating, but hard to publish.
NP: I’m currently at work on a new translation I’m very excited about: an excerpt of a novel by the contemporary Brazilian writer Andréa del Fuego.
ST: My next book-length translation to be published is Dakota by Singaporean Chinese author Wong Koi Tet.
A bottle of cod liver oil, monitor lizards in a storm drain, a coffin in the living room. Through the collection of vignettes and essays, Dakota brings readers back to the heyday of Dakota Crescent and 1970s Singapore, moving between memories of Wong’s childhood and teen years in a neighborhood now lost to change and progress. My translation will be published in Singapore in April this year, but hopefully I can also find a home for it in the US/UK. I’m also super grateful to The Common, The Southern Review and The Georgia Review for publishing excerpts of my translation.