Transnational Literature Series: Eva Baltasar and Julia Sanches with Polly Barton

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with author Eva Baltasar and translator Julia Sanches to discuss and celebrate the release of Mammoth. They will be in conversation with translator and writer Polly Barton.

The followup novel to International Booker-shortlisted Boulder is a story of queer motherhood and survival deep in the countryside.

Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work—all in pursuit of life in the raw.

This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.

Eva Baltasar is an acclaimed poet with ten volumes of poetry to her name. Her debut novel Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. Boulder‘s English translation was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. The author lives in a Catalonian village near the mountains.

Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Among her translations are Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. Her translation of Eva Baltasar’s Boulder was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Moderator Polly Barton is a Japanese-English translator and writer based in the UK. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. Her translation of Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai was awarded a 2023-2024 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize. She is the author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History, both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.