Up Front: Jane Smiley

By THE EDITORS

October 25, 2009

Earlier this year, the novelist Jane Smiley was a judge for the Man Booker International Prize, which recognizes a fiction writer from anywhere whose work is widely available in English. (The Canadian Alice Munro won.)

“I got into the habit of doing research on the writers we were reading,” she said in a recent e-mail message, “so as soon as I started ‘The Book of Fathers’ for my review, I looked up Miklos Vamos. He’s about my age, well along in his career, and quite prominent in Hungary and Europe. If he’d been one of those authors routinely translated into English, I would have run out and bought more books, and tried to get a sense of his development, his aesthetic, his characteristic way of going about his art. But no such luck.

“I had something of the same experience with the Russian author Ludmila Ulitskaya when we were reading for the Booker — there were enough books to read for the prize, but only our Ukrainian juror could read the novel that was considered her masterpiece, because it was still untranslated. Considering that Ulitskaya is thought to be an heir to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, what a shame we can’t read her greatest book! Reading authors from around the world gave me a real taste for more.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Upfront-t.html?ref=review