About this Event
Join us for an evening in conversation with Anglo-Swiss-Italian author Gabriella Zalapì and translator Adriana Hunter, chaired by writer and critic Catherine Taylor, to launch the English translation of Zalapì’s acclaimed French language novel: Illaria, or The Conquest of Disobedience.
One afternoon in May, 8 year old Ilaria gets into the car with her dad, expecting to go out to dinner with her mum and sister. Instead, she is taken across the border, on a whirlwind journey around Italy, from Trieste to Rome and Sicily, sleeping in roadside hotels, singing to the radio, and fearing her often drunk, but loving father. Torn between her life in Geneva with her mother and the seemingly never ending Italian road trip with her father, Ilaria doesn’t know who to side with in her parents’ acrimonious separation.
Throughout her travels, Ilaria meets new faces, learns how to light a cigarette, discovers when is best to keep quiet around her father, and finds comfort in her lovable teddy bear Birillo. Ilaria’s voice is singular and powerful; while her travels through Italy and the cast of characters around her create an unforgettable image of Italy .
This deeply moving novel explores the fear and confusion felt during this chaotic kidnapping, through the dreamlike eyes of the young girl. Intimate and poignant, Ilaria follows the life of a girl who is learning to navigate the world on her own.
Gabriella Zalapì is a writer and visual artist, born (1972) to an English-Italian-Swiss family in Milan. Her previous novel, Antonia (2019), received the Grand Prix de l’héroïne Madame Figaro, and the Prix Biblomedia. Zalapì uses her own family history as the basis for her work, taking photographs, archive material, and memoirs and composing them into a disquieting play of history and fiction. She has been awarded the Prix Femina des Lycéens 2024, the Prix Millepages 2024, and the Prix Blù Jean-Marc Roberts 2024 for Illaria, or The Conquest of Disobedience. She now lives and works in Paris.
Adriana Hunter, award-winning translator, has brought more than 100 books to English-language readers since ‘discovering’ the first book she was to translate, and still enjoys the buzz of finding promising new francophone authors. Her recent work includes the international bestseller The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier and three volumes of Sapiens: A Graphic History based on Yuval Noah Harari’s global phenomenon, Sapiens. She relishes the challenges of translating anything from intricate literary fiction to the goofy antics and word games of Asterix and Obelix. She won the 2011 Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi (Peirene Press, 2010) and the 2013 French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Hervé Le Tellier’s Electrico W, and her translations have been shortlisted twice for the International Booker Prize.
Catherine Taylor is a writer and critic and the former deputy director of English PEN. Her first book, The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time, won the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize for autobiography and life-writing.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Waterstones, 11 Islington Green, London, United Kingdom
GBP 5.00 to GBP 15.00
