The Shape of the Ruins

"Hugely ambitious: 500-odd pages, but my goodness, it rattled along. You really hurtle through the narrative. Again, there are moments here where both fiction and non-fiction graze—because the writer himself appears as the writer within the narrative, but it’s one of those books that really pounds your mind with every sentence. There’s beautiful rhythmic prose—again, an acute and lyrical translation—and it really unpacks how we unpack evidence about the story of the world. The fundamental thing is it’s based in Colombia and looks at a very turbulent recent political history there over the last 50 or 60 years. And it interrogates the conspiracy theories that arise from politics and from the understanding of politics today. So it felt incredibly relevant too: the power of populism and why we become the stories that we tell about ourselves and tell about others. Yeah, it’s really fascinating because there were very un-gendered conversations that we had about the works. It certainly was not a political or strategic move to have, as you say, five out of six authors women and all the translators women. It might be a by-product of the approach that I described before—a determination that we have to be really honest with ourselves about why we love a book, why it speaks to us. Are we being too particular? We’re reading for a huge number of people who we want to pick up and enjoy these books. “A recent study noted that only 26% of all translated fiction was written by women” So I think it was the way that we read, actually, rather than, as I said, it being any kind of mechanistic or strategic approach. But it’s interesting that that’s what’s happened. I think it’s really good news, because I know that there was a recent study that noted that only 26% of all translated fiction was written by women, so it’s fantastic that we’ve got all women represented here. Hopefully that’s a comment on the state of the business, rather than on our choices, the fact that there’s so many women being represented as translators."