Stories to Save Languages - Auckland Writers Festival 2024

Friday , 17 May 2024, 2:30pm – 3:30pm

Ka ngaro te reo, ka ngaro taua, pera i te ngaro o te moa.
If the language is lost, man will be lost, as dead as the moa.

Storytelling is humankind’s unique evolutionary advantage. We pass down knowledge, history and memories through stories. However, it is estimated that every 40 days a language dies. And with the loss of a language follows the loss of its unique stories.

But many writers are taking deliberate action to platform and uplift diverse languages. Samoan comic artist Michel Mulipola uses graphic novels to amplify Samoan language and culture; Hong Kong writer Louise Law Lok-Man sees translation as a way for Cantonese writing to reach wider audiences; and award-winning author Shilo Kino (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maniapoto) was inspired by her personal journey reclaiming te reo Māori to write a new novel.

In conversation with writer and translator Daniel Hahn, this panel will illuminate the power of literature to save languages, urging more publishers to give space for linguistically and culturally diverse stories.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with over a hundred books to his name. His books include Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, and the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature; and translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) from Africa, Europe and the Americas. Recent translations include fiction from Angola, Brazil, Spain, Guatemala and Argentina, children's picture-books from Portugal and France, and works of non-fiction about dreams, death and lighthouses.

His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Dublin Literary Award and been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, among numerous others.

He is a past chair of the Society of Authors (the UK writers' union) and on the board of many organisations working with literature, translation and free speech. He currently translating a Colombian novel, compiling an anthology of Brazilian short stories and writing a book about Shakespeare in translation.

Supported by Latin American CAPE.

Event website

https://www.writersfestival.co.nz/programmes/event/stories-to-save-languages/1493817/

Media

Radio New Zealand, 8 May 2024. Daniel Hahn on interpreting literary works. Nine to Noon.