Our book club welcomes people from all round the world for a discussion about a work of fiction which has recently been translated into English. We meet on Zoom once each month during Trinity's term time. Admission is free, and participants may join as and when it suits. This month, we will be discussing:

Forgottenness

by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins.

[from the book's cover]:

Two tales intertwined in a profound double portrait, Forgottenness painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, the collective and the individual, between the stories of two people born on the same day, a century apart.

The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882–1931), a once-significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time.

As she plunges into her nation’s history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question – what does it mean to remember?

 Tanja Maljartschuk, born in Ivano-Frankivsk (1983), is an acclaimed contemporary Ukrainian writer with three novels and several collections of short prose and poetry to her name. She now writes in German as well as Ukrainian, and her work has been translated into more than ten languages. Her most recent awards are the Theodor Kramer Prize for writing in Resistance and Exile (2023) and the Usedom Literature Prize (2022).

Zenia Tompkins is an American literary translator and the founder of the Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature in Translation (TAULT). Her previous work includes the English translation of Maljartschuk’s A Biography of a Chance Miracle (2018).

If you enjoy events about literary translation, take a look at what else we have planned at the Centre, here.