Thursday, August 15th
6:30-9pm
Join acclaimed Swedish author Andrzej Tichý and his translator Nichola Smalley as they discuss Tichý’s debut collection of short stories, Purity, with Anthony Anaxagorou.
The stories in Purity take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has an outburst on a bus; a fugitive finds insight in a colour wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief finds himself in books. And cleaners reluctantly go on cleaning.
With gravity and humour, against the backdrop of a violent civilization, people are depicted as fallen, or waiting to fall, rendered by Tichý with the fury, compassion and emotional complexity of Kendrick Lamar.
‘How something can be simultaneously so powerful and so precise is hard to comprehend. But as a depiction of human existence in today’s evermore precarious labour market, it is brilliant. The truth is that it’s rare to find literary prose, or for that matter political criticism, as refined as this.’
Dagens Nyheter
Andrzej Tichý was born in Prague to a Polish mother and a Czech father and has lived in Sweden since 1981. He is the author of numerous novels, a story collection, and a wide range of nonfiction and criticism. Tichý has received critical acclaim for his work, and is widely recognized as one of the most important novelists of his generation. His novel Wretchedness, a post-political foray into modern day Swedish society, was shortlisted for the August Prize and won the Eyvind Johnson Prize in Sweden and, in English translation, was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Purity was a 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize finalist.
Nichola Smalley is a translator of Swedish and Norwegian literature. Her translation of Andrzej Tichý’s Wretchedness won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was nominated for the International Booker and Bernard Shaw Prizes, and in 2023 her translation of Amanda Svensson’s A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Warwick Prize. She lives in Hackney.
Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection.