April 2026
It’s been quite a couple of months for us. First of all, translator, Antonella Lettieri and I shared the Translators’ Association First Translation Prize for our work on Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone, then we found ourselves on the longlist for the International Booker Prize with Matteo Melchiorre’s The Duke, again translated by Antonella Lettieri. Unfortunately, we haven’t made the shortlist, but what an adventure it has been. We have so loved seeing so many readers getting to know about this extraordinary book and we have been bowled over by how they are falling for its subtle, but incredibly powerful spell. If you haven’t got your hands on a copy yet – and it is now back in stock, we promise – these brief interviews with Matteo and Antonella are a lovely introduction to the book and will whet your appetite for it, we’re sure.
“A writer is born.” This is how her French publishers, Grasset described the sublime writing of Ève Guerra in Repatriation that we published on March 12. This extraordinary novel, translated by Clodagh Kinsella, tells the story of Annabella, an aspiring poet and classicist in Lyon, who is suddenly faced with having to repatriate the body of her estranged father from Cameroon. As she struggles with corruption, bureaucracy and her father’s family in South-West France, she struggles in parallel with the memories of her traumatic childhood in Africa, and the disintegration of her father’s relationship with her mother, a far younger Congolese woman. Ève’s description of the utter discombobulation and destruction grief in the first chapter, as Annabella finds out in the middle of her day of her father’s death is one of the most powerful bits of writing I’ve come across in a long time, and her development of Annabella’s unreliable, vulnerable character is masterful. Listen to Ève give her introduction to the book in this clip.
The confluence of The Duke’s longlisting, the fabulous Winter Olympics in Cortina, a stone’s throw from where Matteo lives and the book is set and a well-chosen winter pick at my book group brought this to my reading list for the first time. The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes is a rip-roaring Alpine thriller, set in the immediate post-war, with a powerful cast of baddies, falling down crevices and impaling themselves on alpine equipment. As well as being a true page-turner, it’s powerfully evocative of the political and social vacuum and sense of rootlessness that the war left in continental Europe, a bit like a snowy, mountainous The Third Man. It also introduced me to the unforgettable word slittovia, the first kind of mechanical ski-lift. Although I’ve never come across one, I wish I had – there’s far more romance in a slittovia, than a four-person chair.
As publishers of works from the Mediterranean, it’s only natural that we spend quite a lot of our time thinking about food. The Translation Association awards ceremony was just down the road from Foundry Editions at the British Library, so we invited Antonella, her partner Rob and her parents to come for dinner afterwards. Foolishly, we decided to do something more nerve-wracking than any awards process, cook Italian food for Italians. At first, we thought of doing something suitably Dolomitic from Meredith Erickson’s bible of all things spaetzle, schnitzel and strudel Alpine Cooking, but in an already tense situation, sense prevailed and Paul cooked his (relatively) simple aubergine parmegiana. As everyone sat down, announcing gleefully that melanzane alla parmegiana was their favourite, stakes couldn’t have been higher. Did we pull it off? Find out and find Paul’s failsafe, faff-less recipe:
After all this talk of winter, Spring is finally trying to be upon us. April promises to be exciting with Rosa Ribas talking at the Oxford Literary Festival and our first journey to Greece with Makis Malafekas’s Deepfake available on April 14th. If you’ve enjoyed our Mediterranean meanderings, do encourage any like-minded souls to sign up too.
A presto, and have a wonderful Easter,
Richard
Editor