Roundtable discussion on the forthcoming publication of Caroline Lamarche's The Memory of the Air (Héloïse Press, 2022)

The Living Texts Research Group at the School of Modern Languages at Durham University is pleased to host Belgian writer Caroline Lamarche, as well as translator Katherine Gregor and publisher Aina Marti to discuss the forthcoming publication of The Memory of the Air (La Mémoire de l’air originally published by Gallimard in 2014) in English by Héloïse Press. 

The roundtable will be an opportunity to explore the many ‘lives’ of the text, from writing, to translation, to publication. The discussion will be in English and open to all. 

Caroline Lamarche (Liège, 1955) is a novelist, poet, script writer and author of radio dramas. She spent her childhood in the north of Spain and her adolescence in the region of Paris. She moved to Africa where she taught French in English to Nigerian children. She returned to Belgium and had two daughters in the early 1980s. She received the prestigious Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle for her collection of short stories Nous sommes à la lisière (Gallimard, 2019). She lives in the outskirts of Brussels.

Katherine Gregor worked as an English as a Foreign Language teacher, press agent, theatrical agent and a few other things before becoming a full-time literary translator from Italian and French, in 2014. She translates fiction, non-fiction and plays. She was on the Premio Strega Jury in 2020. She also created 'The Italianist', a column about untranslated Italian books, for the European Literary Network. Her translation credits include Stefania Auci's The Florios of Sicily (HarperVia), Marion Brunet's Summer of Reckoning (Bitter Lemon), Donato Carrisi's Into the Labyrinth (Little, Brown), and Sylvain Tesson's Berezina (Europa Editions). She is currently writing a non-fiction book.

Aina Marti set up Héloïse Press in 2021. Caroline Lamarche's The Memory of the Air will be Héloïse's third title. Prior to becoming a publisher, Aina worked in academia and TV production, and has been a collaborator for the European Literature Network and New Books in German.