In partnership with Villa Gillet in Lyon, we’re thrilled to bring two authors to a wider international audience, and to celebrate the power and the art of translation.

Writer, editor, critic and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson’s bestselling debut Constellations won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2019. Described as ‘a powerful, inspiring gift to readers everywhere’, Constellations tells the story of a life in a body as it goes through sickness, health and motherhood, and explores a range of subjects: art, illness, ghosts, grief and our very ways of seeing. Constellations was this year published in France, in a translation by Cécile Arnaud.

Night as It Falls is a contemporary and mesmerising novel about love, destruction, silences and the traces we leave behind. Rich in vital ideas about identity, first love, class and contemporary anxiety, Jakuta Alikavazovic’s English language debut – translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman – is a wild love letter to what is lost. A French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins, she won the Prix Goncourt in 2008 for Best First Novel.

The two authors will discuss their writing and the experiences of finding new readers through translation.

La Villa Gillet is a unique and original cultural institute interested in culture in all its forms. It brings together artists, writers, novelists and researchers from all over the world and encourages the public to engage with the intellectual life of contemporary languages and ideas.

In partnership with Villa Gillet, Lyon and supported by the Embassy of France in Ireland.

IMAGE JAKUTA: Maia Flore