‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
are of imagination all compact.’
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, And Other Stories and Hay Festival have selected twelve contemporary international authors to each write an original and previously unpublished story as their tribute to these giants of world literature.
In order to celebrate the international influence of both writers and offer us new and intriguing perspectives on them, six English-speaking authors have taken inspiration from Cervantes and his work, while six Spanish-language authors have written stories inspired by Shakespeare.
The authors are Ben Okri, Deborah Levy, Kamila Shamsie, Yuri Herrera, Marcos Giralt Torrente, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Vicente Molina Foix, Soledad Puértolas, Hisham Matar, Nell Leyshon, Rhidian Brook and Valeria Luiselli. An introduction by Salman Rushdie explores the liberating legacy of Cervantes and Shakespeare for contemporary fiction.
Yuri Herrera’s first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the Best Translated Book Award and was chosen by The Guardian as one of ‘The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century’. His second novel The Transmigration of Bodies was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and his sci-fi inflected collection of stories Ten Planets was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. He teaches at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Deborah Levy is a British playwright, novelist and poet. Her novels include the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home (2011) and Hot Milk (2016), and the Booker-longlisted The Man Who Saw Everything (2019). Deborah is also the author of a collection of short stories, Black Vodka (2013), and a trilogy of prize-winning Living Autobiographies: Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some sixty-something books to his name. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among others.
Margarita Valencia (Bogotá, 1958) has devoted most of her professional life to books, as editor, teacher, literary critic, translator. Her publishing projects have included the Bogotá publishing house Carlos Valencia Editores, literary collections edited for Grupo Editorial Norma, and Libro al viento, a publishing project aimed at closing the gap between the reader and the book. She has been a staff writer for several magazines (El Malpensante, Cambio, Arcadia, Guión), and the newspaper La Prensa, and her texts have been published in various anthologies. She conceived and directs the program in Book Studies in the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, and co-directs Los libros, a program that airs on National Public Radio.
Rosalind Harvey was born in Bristol in 1982. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She runs regular translation-related public events in the UK and is a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, an advice and support network for early-career literary translators.
