In my last post I wrote about Paul Lynch’s Booker prize-winning novel Prophet Song set in a near-future dystopian Ireland. We stay with Ireland for this post about Louise Kennedy’s 2022 novel Trespasses, though Trespasses, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, is set in Northern Ireland (not the Republic) and in the past, the 1970s, during what is commonly referred to as ‘The Troubles’. Continue reading “Eating during the Troubles”
Food as a source of comfort
I’ve written previously about food in dystopian literature, using George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as my chosen text. Continue reading “Food as a source of comfort”
Food and loss
Jyoti Patel’s debut novel, The things that we lost, explores the idea of loss in a number of different ways. Continue reading “Food and loss”
A literary and culinary translation
From the earliest times stories have been translated into other languages, adapted into different contexts and rewritten to suit a new place, time and readership. From Chaucer borrowing from the works of the Italian writers Boccaccio and Petrarch for many of his Canterbury Tales to Shakespeare’s plundering of historical records and ancient tales, where stories are concerned there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. Continue reading “A literary and culinary translation”