Julia Sherwood is a renowned translator who Parthian has previously worked on with Uršuľa Kovalyk's The Equestrienne and will be again on her follow-up Night Circus and Other Stories. Julia and her husband and fellow translator, Peter, have long been advocates for Slovak literature and its translation to a wider audience.
The most recent dividend of her effort is Into the Spotlight: New Writing from Slovakia published in English by Three String Books and translated and edited by Julia Sherwood and Magdalena Mullek. University of Bristol's Rajendra Chitnis penned a review of the anthology, summing it up beautifully as '... nineteen mostly very short stories or extracts by sixteen living Slovak authors ... designed to whet the reader’s appetite.' The review details how the editors took a representative selection from each decade leading up to 2010 with a continuity amid 'shifts of style'. This book comes as a much-needed response to a lack of translated literature from this area. As Chitnis describes:
In a May 2015 Literature Across Frontiers report on the quantity of translated literature published in the British Isles between 1990 and 2012, Alexandra Büchler and Gloria Trentacosti consider Slovak literature one of the most seriously under-represented...
This finding is something that keeps Parthian motivated. This review is a good example of how the academic, translation, writing, and publishing community all converge to produce quality works of literature in the English language. It brings new readers and more awareness.
We hope to bring greater representation through Night Circus, continuing to situate Wales in the context of Europe and the international community.
