Mariana Enriquez & Megan McDowell with Daniel Hahn

Translator Megan McDowell has worked with many of the new generation of Latin American authors – including Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meraune and Samanta Schweblin – to bring their stylish, gothic writing to enthusiastic readers all over the world.
 
This evening, McDowell and journalist, novelist and short story writer Enriquez discuss the explosive collection of short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. This translation marks the second time that Enriquez and McDowell have worked together, after 2017’s Things We Lost in the Fire, as well as Enriquez’s third visit to the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
 
‘Her fiction hits with the full force of a train,’ says Dave Eggers about Enriquez, whose kaleidoscopic array of vignettes superbly conjures up a set of oddball, punky, outsider characters in overlooked corners of Buenos Aires.
 
Packed with ghoulish apparitions, uncontrollable desires and weird imaginings, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a visceral, fist-clenched, full-throated assault on all the senses – fearless fiction that feels perfectly attuned to our times.
 
In today’s session Enriquez and McDowell talk with writer, editor and translator Daniel Hahn, renowned for his translations from Spanish and Portuguese and who has himself been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for his English-language edition of Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion.

This event includes a short performed reading from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by actor Lucy Phelps, directed by Blanche McIntyre on behalf of the Royal Shakespeare Company and commissioned by The Booker Prizes.

Available to watch on-demand shortly after the live broadcast has finished.