Settee Seminars

Ilkley Literature Festival

Ilkley Literature Festival presents Settee Seminars, a podcast series of fascinating short talks by leading experts, introducing you to a wide range of topics from modern U.S. history to psychiatry and 18th century literature. In each episode, a leading specialist in their field condenses years of study into a bite-sized 20-minute talk, giving listeners the chance to explore entire worlds of knowledge you might not even have known existed without ever having to leave your sofa.

  1. Translators on Translation - part three: Antonella Lettieri & Olivia Santovetti - translating Enrico Remmert from Italian into English

    19/03/2025

    Translators on Translation - part three: Antonella Lettieri & Olivia Santovetti - translating Enrico Remmert from Italian into English

    Delve into the art and craft of translation in our three-part spin-off series ‘Translators on Translation’, presented in partnership with the ⁠John Dryden Translation Competition⁠ and the ⁠Centre for World Literatures⁠ at the University of Leeds. In this episode Olivia Santovetti, Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds, talks to translator Antonella Lettieri who won first prize in the 2022-23 John Dryden Translation Competition for her translation The War of the Murazzi from La guerra dei Murazzi by Enrico Remmert. You can read Antonella's prize-winning translation ⁠⁠here⁠⁠. You can keep up to date with Antonella's work by visiting her website here or following her on Instagram here. You can order her latest full-length translation, of A Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone, here. The John Dryden Translation Competition is run by the University of Leeds Centre for World Literatures and sponsored by the ⁠British Comparative Literature Association⁠ and the ⁠British Centre for Literary Translation⁠. Prizes are awarded for the best unpublished literary translations of poetry, prose, or drama from any period from any language into English. You can find out more about the John Dryden Translation Competition and entering your translation ⁠here⁠.

    46 min
  2. Translators on Translation - part two: Naomi Mottram & Sarah Hudspith – translating Sofia Sinitskaia from Russian into English

    16/12/2024

    Translators on Translation - part two: Naomi Mottram & Sarah Hudspith – translating Sofia Sinitskaia from Russian into English

    Delve into the art and craft of translation in our three-part spin-off series ‘Translators on Translation’, presented in partnership with the ⁠John Dryden Translation Competition⁠ and the ⁠Centre for World Literatures⁠ at the University of Leeds. In this episode Sarah Hudspith, Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds, talks to translator Naomi Mottram⁠, who won second prize in the 2022-23 John Dryden Translation Competition for her translation of Mitrofanushka Durasov by Sofia Sinitskaia. They discuss Naomi’s approach to the process of translating the Russian text into English, the nuances of translating the work of a living author and why English-speaking readers should read contemporary Russian literature. You can read Naomi’s prize-winning translation of Mitrofanushka Durasov by Sofia Sinitskaia ⁠⁠here⁠⁠. The John Dryden Translation Competition is run by the University of Leeds Centre for World Literatures and sponsored by the ⁠British Comparative Literature Association⁠ and the ⁠British Centre for Literary Translation⁠. Prizes are awarded for the best unpublished literary translations of poetry, prose, or drama from any period from any language into English. The John Dryden Translation Competition 2024 – 2025 is now open. The competition deadline is 5 February 2025. You can find out more about the competition and entering your translation ⁠here⁠.

    26 min
  3. Translators on Translation - part one: David McCallam & Richard Hibbitt – translating Christophe Tarkos from French into English

    26/11/2024

    Translators on Translation - part one: David McCallam & Richard Hibbitt – translating Christophe Tarkos from French into English

    Delve into the art and craft of translation in our three-part spin-off series ‘Translators on Translation’, presented in partnership with the John Dryden Translation Competition and the Centre for World Literatures at the University of Leeds.   In this episode Richard Hibbitt, Professor of French & Comparative Literature at the University of Leeds, talks to translator David McCallam, who won third prize in the 2022-23 John Dryden Translation Competition for “No Words but Word-Dough” and “The Feeling” translated from Christophe Tarkos’s French text ‘Il y a pâte-mot’ and ‘Le sentiment’. They discuss why David chose to translate Christophe Tarkos, as well as David’s approach to the process of translation.   The John Dryden Translation Competition is run by the University of Leeds Centre for World Literatures and sponsored by the British Comparative Literature Association and the British Centre for Literary Translation. Prizes are awarded for the best unpublished literary translations of poetry, prose, or drama from any period from any language into English.   The John Dryden Translation Competition 2024 – 2025 is now open. The competition deadline is 5 February 2025. You can find out more about the competition and entering your translation here.   You can read David McCallam’s translations here.

    25 min

  4. 12/03/2024

    Olivia Santovetti, Richard Hibbitt & Domenico Scarpa - Italo Calvino in a Nut/Shell

    This talk was recorded at the University of Leeds in 2023. To find out more, visit the University of Leeds website. The centenary of the birth of Italo Calvino, the most widely translated Italian author of the 20th century, was in 2023. The Italian critic Domenico Scarpa marked the centenary with his magisterial publication (Calvino fa la conchiglia. La costruzione di uno scrittore, Hoepli, 2023) and here explores the popularity of Calvino in the anglophone world. Starting from the ‘The Spiral’, the cosmicomic story about the construction of a self which is a constant narrative theme for Calvino (and the inspiration for Scarpa’s book’s title), the conversation moves back in time to the fantastic novellas of Our Ancestors from the 1950s then forward to Invisibile cities, which in 1972 established Calvino's international reputation, finally concluding with If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979) and Mr Palomar (1983). Using as a springboard the commentaries of writers who admired Calvino, including Gore Vidal, John Barth, Salman Rushdie and Semaus Heaney, the timeless qualities that make Calvino’s works so beloved outside Italy and so pertinent to understanding our contemporary world are investigated.

    1h 3m

  5. 12/03/2024

    Greg Radick and Mike Dixon - Charles Darwin in Ilkley

    This talk was recorded at the 2023 Ilkley Literature Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit our website. When Charles Darwin arrived in Ilkley in October 1859, he had just finished working on his epochal book On the Origin of Species. After his monumental labours, he looked forward to restoring his body and mind in the Northern home of “the water cure”. But his nine-week visit turned out to be socially and intellectually lively, in ways that illuminate the man and his times, and even the enigmatic illness that plagued him. In this talk, Mike Dixon and Gregory Radick share new evidence on what Darwin got up to during his stay in the North and what he took away for his future scientific work.

    29 min

  6. 12/03/2024

    Colin Grant, Alex Wheatle & Susan Pitter - Being Black in Britain

    This podcast was recorded as part of the 2023 Ilkley Literature Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit our website. In a conversation with Susan Pitter, award-winning writers Alex Wheatle and Colin Grant come together to discuss their personal experiences of being Black in Britain; the people, places, and music they turned to navigate their identity and the racism they faced. Wheatle’s Sufferah explores his childhood marred by abuse – with no knowledge of his Jamaican parentage or family history – his imprisonment as a young man protesting systemic racism and police brutality, and how he found salvation and comfort in reggae. Grant’s I’m Black So You Don’t Have To Be explores the lives of his family members – from his mother’s longing to return to Jamaica, to his sister who refashioned herself as an African princess – and the impact they had on Grant’s own shifting sense of self.

    30 min

  7. 12/03/2024

    Helen Finch & Alessio Baldini - Ukraine and The Voices of Those Left Behind: Jewish Novelists Natalia Ginzburg and Katja Petrowskaja in Dialogue

    When we think about World War Two or the Holocaust, our minds go to those who fought or were deported to the camps. In this literary dialogue, Helen Finch and Alessio Baldini bring to you the voices of those writers who were left behind. Natalia Ginzburg was 28 and the mother of three when her husband, Leone Ginzburg (an Italian Jew of Ukrainian descent) died in prison after being beaten by the Gestapo. The Ginzburg family had lived in ‘confino’ (internal exile) for a few years. As an Italian Jew, Natalia was now in hiding with her children to flee persecution. She survived to become one of the most important writers in post-war Italy. In her writings, she explores how vulnerability and dependence make us human, and often returns to how the war years have shaped her outlook on life. Contemporary writer Katja Petrowskaja, a Jewish writer born in Ukraine and writing in German, explores narratives of Jewish family history in Ukraine and Germany before and after the Holocaust. Her major work Maybe Esther (tr. Shelley Frisch, 2014) traces the impossibility of reconstructing the lives of her family members who were destroyed in the Holocaust. More recently, Petrowskaja’s journalism from Berlin traces the connections between the Nazi invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s current war on Ukraine, started in 2022.

    39 min

  8. 12/03/2024

    Timothy Thurston and Tsering Samdrup - No Laughing Matter: Understanding Tibetan experience in China through Comedy

    What do people think about when they hear China and Tibet in the same sentence? They often think of the traumatic experiences of surveillance, self-immolations, repression of religious expression, and international accusations of cultural genocide. Rarely will they think of traditional humour, and modern comedy disseminated in audiovisual media. But laughter is more characteristic of the everyday Tibetan experience, and attending to Tibetan humor and comedy can help us understand contemporary Tibetan experience in contemporary China. Interspersed with clips in the original Tibetan, Tim Thurston and collaborator Tsering Samdrup will discuss their preparation of a book of translated Tibetan comedic scripts, and how these comedies can help provide a nuanced understanding of the complexities of everyday Tibetan experience in twentieth and twenty-first century China.

    24 min
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About

Ilkley Literature Festival presents Settee Seminars, a podcast series of fascinating short talks by leading experts, introducing you to a wide range of topics from modern U.S. history to psychiatry and 18th century literature. In each episode, a leading specialist in their field condenses years of study into a bite-sized 20-minute talk, giving listeners the chance to explore entire worlds of knowledge you might not even have known existed without ever having to leave your sofa.

Information

  • Creator
    Ilkley Literature Festival
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2025
  • Episodes
    35
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ilkley Literature Festival
  • Show Website
    Settee Seminars