June 8, 2017
A poet, translator and fiction writer, Idra Novey honors all those genres in her first novel, “Ways to Disappear.” “This novel,” she told me in a recent conversation, “is a stewing pot in which I threw in poetry and translation in the same book. I put a lid on it and turned up the heat, hoping it would cook into something.” The satisfying result has been a much acclaimed, prize-winning book, which has just won the 2017 Jewish Book Council’s Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Novey, who is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, has translated the work of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector whom she discovered when she was a student at Barnard: I took a class in Experimental Texts by Latin American women where I read Lispector for the first time. I felt an intense kinship with her. Her relationship to Brazil as an outsider and a Jew was something I related to. I felt similarly in western Pennsylvania. [Lispector and I] were both in places that were not easy for intense, artistic Jewish women to be. Read more: http://forward.com/sisterhood/373838/debut-jewish-novel-has-appalachian-roots-and-sephardic-influence/ Source: Idra Novey’s Award-Winning Novel’s Sephardic Influence – The Forward