One of the liveliest strands at this year's book festival has been translation, with authors pouring in from all over the world. It has even spawned a "translation cabaret", with games of "Qu'est que c'est" charades and literary consequences. We listen in to what happened when the first line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude ("Many years later, as he faced the firing squad ...") passed through all the languages in the Spiegeltent.
We also talk to the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov about his latest slice of post-Soviet absurdist satire, The Gardener of Ochakov. And we discuss celebrity, excess and the Italian male with Niccolò Ammaniti, whose Let the Games Begin transforms a Roman park into wildlife reserve, with underground catacombs haunted by Olympic defectors ...
Reading list
The Gardener from Ochakov by Andrey Kurkov (Harvill Secker)
Let the Games Begin by Niccolò Ammaniti (Canongate)
