Small Boat

"This is a novel that is written from the perspective of a rescue boat dispatcher who fails to dispatch a rescue team for a group of migrants who subsequently sink to their deaths. This book will hopefully disturb you and make you question why you feel so disturbed. It is a short book that is nevertheless full of horror and rage and guilt. As a translator, I am constantly being asked if I sacrifice accuracy for aesthetics or vice versa, and my answer always is that this is a false binary. You cannot separate social or political value from literary value. You cannot divorce a text from the context in which it exists, as language exists within a culture, and literature is made of language. Too many people regard translation as the separation of a text from its source culture when it is just as much the integration of a text into a new context."