Vol. 5 No. 1 (2018): February

Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the February 2018 issue of Writers in Conversation. We are delighted to publish our ninth collection of interviews with a diverse selection of writers at work today: novelists, poets, translators and academics from across the globe. This allows us to see world literature in microcosm: innovative, passionate, transnational and political.   

Despite the variety of the writers, some questions and themes recur. Postcolonial literature plays a large role, as do accompanying questions of politics, geography, race, religion, immigration and diaspora.  Two of the writers (Bama Faustina Soosairaj and Kapilkrishna Thapur) are activists from India; one is an indigenous writer (Leane Betasamosake Simpson) from Canada, and one the prominent British author, academic and journalist Will Self. The work of the leading world writer J.M. Coetzee is the subject of an article bringing together the insights of five of his translators, something else highly pertinent to questions of world writing.

We are delighted to have a mixture of writers here from the very well-known to the as yet lesser known, writers who merit attention for their politics, their stories and the feelings they portray. We firmly believe not in ‘The Death of the Author’ but in the author’s paramount importance. We hope you enjoy reading the interviews as much as we did – and if you think you have something that would interest us, please do send it!

Nick Turner and Gillian Dooley