29th May, 18:30, Waterstones London Islington

Voracious follows a year in the life of a young woman caring for her dying grandmother in the company of her grandfather, her friend, and plants and animals – from flies to cats, ants to dogs. Meanwhile their village in the Beskid mountains, in southern Poland, which echoes with noises from the nearby slaughterhouse, is threatened by a landslide. Małgorzata Lebda guides us through the countryside, changing seasons, wildlife, illness, death, and love. Everything is at once fragile and full of life, animate and inanimate. 

Małgorzata Lebda is well-known as a poet, with six collections to her name. Among other major accolades, she won the prestigious Wisława Szymborska Award in 2022. Voracious, the winner of Empik’s Best Newcomer in Poland and shortlisted for the Conrad, and Angelus and NIKE Prize, is her debut novel. Małgorzata Lebda is also a photographer and marathon runner – she ran 1,113 kilometers along the Vistula River as part of her activism/poetry project Reading Water.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones translates fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s books from Polish. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

Sasha Dugdale has published six collections of poems with Carcanet, her latest, The Strongbox, was published in 2024. Joy, published in 2017, was a PBS Choice. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and in 2017 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize for Poetry.

Her translations of the Russian poet Maria Stepanova are published by Bloodaxe and Fitzcarraldo Editions and have been shortlisted for the International Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, amongst others. She won the Lois Roth Award for her translation of Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory. Dugdale has published many translations of Russian-language women’s writing, and a number of her play translations have been produced by theatres in the UK and US. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. 

Tickets £5 – Book here: https://tinyurl.com/489nzjt5