Translation Slam! Celebrating Women In Translation Month with Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes | Wednesday 26 August, 7.30pm

Celebrate August as WOMEN IN TRANSLATION month by joining us for a TRANSLATION SLAM focussing on a blisteringly entertaining yet brilliantly subtle and complex novel by the sensational Virginie Despentes!

This event is supported by Institut français Royaume-Uni

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Two literary translators, Ruth Clarke and Tina Kover - under the watchful eye of French scholar Dr Jess Mallet-Pont - will share and debate their English versions of the same text, a short passage taken from Virginie Despentes's Dear Dickhead - the most recently translated and published work by the former maid, sex worker, and freelance rock journalist, author of the controversial rape-revenge story Baise-moi. The two will compare their choices, sharing and discussing the reasoning behind the word, sentence, and phrasing decisions that they each made and opening to the audience the creative intricacies of the translator’s art.

Ruth works from Italian, French and Spanish, and has translated an eclectic range of work by authors from Benin to Venezuela, including Cristina Caboni’s debut novel The Secret Ways of Perfume, Aurora Lassaletta Atienza’s memoir The Invisible Brain Injury and Evelina Santangelo’s haunting novel From Another World. She was translator in residence for Durham University and New Writing North in 2022-23.

Tina is an American-born literary translator specializing in both classic and modern literature including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, the Goncourt brothers’ Manette Salomon, and Mahir Guven’s Goncourt Prize-winning Older Brother (a 2020 finalist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). Her translation of Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental won the 2019 Albertine Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction and was a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award, the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize.

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Rebecca Latté is a famous actress in her fifties, perhaps past the peak of her career. Oscar Jayack is a middle-aged, moderately successful author who, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, has been accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist-turned-feminist blogger Zoé Katana.

When Oscar insults Rebecca's appearance on Instagram, she sends a scorching reply and the pair fall into a spiral of mutual antipathy. In back-and-forth emails, they vie for the last word, finding common ground in their experiences of addiction, assessing the changing world around them as Covid locks down Paris, and reluctantly beginning to lean on one another. A novel of rage, irreverence and vulnerability, exploring ageing, gender, privilege, addiction and consent, Dear Dickhead is an excoriating encapsulation of our times and of the broken human beings trying to make sense of it.