Friday 18 June at 4.00 p.m.
Venue: Birkbeck, Main Building B35, Malet Street

Hamid Ismailov and Robert Chandler

Hamid Ismailov, currently writer in residence at BBC World Service, and author of the celebrated novel The Railway (Vintage), written before he left Uzbekistan but the first of his books to be translated into English, will talk to Robert Chandler (whose translation won the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages Prize for 2007). They will talk about his life and literary influences: how much did he know about his grandfather, the mullah Obid-Kori, who was shot in 1937? What are his memories of reading the poetry of Hafez in Persian to his grandmother? They’ll also cover his many years as a translator of Russian and Uzbek, why he ended up writing The Railway in Russian, which Western writers are important to him and the influence of his radio journalism on his writing.

Part of the London Review Bookshop’s
World Literature Weekend