Monday 19th May
6.30-9pm
Join us to celebrate the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlisted Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix in store at Burley Fisher Books. Vincent Delecroix will be in conversation with Helen Stevenson, the translator of Small Boat.
November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsizes in the Channel, resulting in the deaths of 27 people on board. How and why did it happen? The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more accountable than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?
In three parts, moving from the French Government official, to those on the boat, Small Boat is a shocking, moral tale of our times, reminding us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest moments. Described by The International Booker 2025 Prize judges as “a brilliantly unflinching use of literature to ask the most uncomfortable but urgent question of our time: to what extent are we all complicit?” We're pleased to be unpacking this shortlisted book with Burley Fisher Books.
“Vividly translated by Helen Stevenson, and currently on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize, Small Boat (Naufrage, 2023) is painful, compelling and mercifully short, with a powerful undertow.” - Times Literary Supplement
“Delecroix’s powerful and timely meditation on this disturbing rhetoric is a damning indictment of apathy in the face of calamity” - Financial Times
“Migrants are people too - this intricate novel shows why” - The Telegraph
Born in Paris, Vincent Delecroix is a French philosopher and writer. A graduate of the École normale supérieure, and agrégé of philosophy, he teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Delecroix received the Prix Valery Larbaud in 2007 for his novel Ce qui est perdu (2006) and the Grand prix de littérature de l’Académie française after he published Tombeau d’Achille (2008). Small Boat is the first of his novels to be translated into English.
Helen Stevenson studied Modern Languages at Oxford and has been translating French to English for 25 years, including Black Moses (shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize). She is also the author of Mad Elaine and Love Like Salt: A Memoir. After living in France for many years, she now resides in Somerset, UK.