Blackthorn Ashes was meant to be their forever home. For the first six families moving into the exclusive new housing development, it was a chance to live a peaceful life on the cliffs overlooking the Cornish sea, safe in the knowledge that it had been created just for them. But six weeks later, paradise is lost. Six people are dead. And Blackthorn Ashes is left abandoned and unfinished, its dark shadows hiding all manner of secrets. One of its surviving residents, Agnes Gale, is determined to find out the truth about what happened. Even if that truth is deadlier than she could have ever believed possible.

Let’s think of the logical evidence first: ‘Blackthorn Ashes was exclusive, that’s what he’d heard. Being built in stages to spread the expense, and to talk up that exclusivity. By the end of the year, eighteen houses would be perched on the cliff, the sea’s salt eating away at fancy floor-to-ceiling windows and white stone walls.’ Yet the environment decided to disregard these plans. ‘All the people were gone. Twelve half- built houses at the bottom of the estate were shrouded in tattered plastic. Each of the finished houses was a museum. The families left fast on the day of evacuation, no time for removal vans or bubble wrap and boxes.’

I’m pragmatic, rational and impulsive, with loads of working experience relating to the building regulations, planning applications etc I also believe in trolls and elves. Some things are solid and tangible and that’s how we always want them to be. No doubt, and no destruction. Take a house for example. Must be strong and safe. With a lovely garden. And surrounding properties that offer peace and quiet. Good neighbours are a bonus. No drama. And when you have your house then you will turn it into a home, and your family can sleep soundly. Because all is sorted and you are a proud provider, a protector. For Adrian Gale, from the sales team working on this project, that was the ambitious dream goal. Yet as the events before and after the abandonment unfold, he falls into a black hole as he realises that nothing can be real when nature and the past makes claims on logic.

His daughter Agnes focuses on what some people might call supernatural or unknown, and follows her intuition, sixth sense… She was back home after eleven years away, after losing her partner and lover Laura and a job in London. Aged nearly thirty she perceives the world and interacts with people in a different subtle manner, while navigating personal disaster unfolding around her, bringing back secrets and lies, and painful memories. All this while also trying to remember ‘You’re autistic, not contagious’. Laura’s return to the family’s fractured nest unsettles thirteen-year-old Christie who became used to being treated as the only child. The boy does not enjoy his nearly forgotten sister’s uncomfortable emotions; the premonition that something strange is happening at the Ashes. Not so subtle clashes between practical approach to building a housing estate and the sinister stuff affect their mother Ruth who swings between anger and despair, valiantly fighting for their future.

Sarah Hilary has a unique talent to look at the ordinary, and even the mundane, and see the invisible layers of truth hiding in the everyday things. Just like in her previous novel Fragile, equally gothic and unnervingly real, set in the central London, she takes on a certain backdrop or a location and transforms it into an eerie realism, often unsettling and disturbing, and leaves the reader wondering and feeling emotionally wrenched and overwhelmed. In a daring and moving way, I hasten to add. She is tough on her protagonists, too. They are not allowed to rest, or to run away from the situation that brings pain, questions, uncertainty. They have to process and understand what has happened to them and to their loved ones, and to the world around them. Hilary challenges memories, feelings, opinions and beliefs in the name of love because how else could she allow Gales to find some kind of solution and a way out of the trauma? She creates such powerful rich and striking characters to allow us and herself to comprehend and to empathise with the Gales family: broken, hurting, desperate to feel safe and loved; an epitome of ‘Everyone was running from something that bored or trapped or threatened them.’ They were not the only ones, though.

Am I too vague? Perhaps. Black Thorn (Bookshop.org) / Black Thorn (Amazon) was published on thirteenth of July, and that in itself is already quite spooky. A psychological thriller of unique beauty, dipping in and out of magical realism, with nods to Scandinavian mythology (ash is the tree of life), Celtic mythology (blackthorn is symbolic of protection and the overcoming of obstacles for a better future), and the Japanese concept /word of Akiya or empty houses. Sarah Hilary brings all these motives together and lays bare her soul: ‘The earth tells stories.’

Today Capital Crime launched the second ever Fingerprint Awards, designed to champion the very best in crime writing from across the globe published in 2022, as voted for by readers. Authors both new and established are represented across the categories, which are: 1. Crime Novel of the Year, 2. Thriller Novel of the Year, 3. Historical Crime Novel of the Year, 4. Debut Novel of the Year, 5. Audiobook of the Year, and 6. Genre-Busting Book of the Year. 

Readers can vote for their preferred winners in each category on the Capital Crime website by Monday 7th August. The winners will be then announced from 7.30pm on Thursday 31st August, at a special ceremony as part of Capital Crime 2023, at the festival’s fantastic new home at the Royal Leonardo Hotel, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Bestsellers Lisa Jewell and Elly Griffiths lead the Crime Book of the Year shortlist with The Family Remains and Bleeding Heart Yard respectively. They are joined by M. W. Craven, author of The Botanist; Ruth Ware, author of The It Girl; and Anthony Horowitz, author of The Twist of a Knife. 

On the Thriller Novel of the Year shortlist A Good Day to Die by Amen Alonge and Truly Darkly Deeply by Victoria Selman are up against Kellye Garrett’s Like a Sister, Jack Jordan’s Do No Harm and Gillian McAllister’s British Book Award-shortlisted Wrong Place Wrong Time. 

CWA Dagger-shortlisted authors Vaseem Khan and Anna Mazzola are both shortlisted for the Historical Crime Novel of the Year for The Lost Man of Bombay and The Clockwork Girl, alongside the critically acclaimed Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson. Also shortlisted are Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare and A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle. 

A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle is also shortlisted for the Debut Crime Novel of the Year, alongside Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead, Wahala by Nikki May, That Green-Eyed Girl by Julie Owen-Moylan and The Maid by Nita Prose. 

The Genre-Busting Novel of the Year shortlist, set up to recognise a book that defies traditional genres and boundaries of crime fiction, features Suicide Thursday by Will Carver, The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly, Wild and Wicked Things by Francesca May, The Houses of Ashes by Stuart Neville and The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. 

Leading the Audiobook of the Year shortlist is global bestselling sensation Robert Galbraith, for Ink Black Heart. Also shortlisted are the critical successes The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett, Better the Blood by Michael Bennett, The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly and One Last Secret by Adele Parks. 

The advisory board, consisting of authors, bloggers, journalists and leading industry figures have chosen a shortlist of five nominees for each category. Crime and thriller fans will now be given the power to decide who should be recognised for their work via the Capital Crime website. In addition, two further categories will be selected solely by the Capital Crime Advisory Board; the Industry Award of the Year – recognising the best marketing campaign, editorial work, or publishing strategy; and the Thalia Proctor Lifetime Achievement Award – marking an outstanding contribution to the crime writing industry. 

Capital Crime co-founder and Goldsboro Books managing director, David Headley, said: ‘We set up the Fingerprints Awards to celebrate the very best of international crime writing, and crucially, to celebrate the readers who make everything we do worthwhile – and possible. 2022 saw some truly incredible, unique and enthralling crime fiction of all kinds published, from Erin Kelly’s spellbinding The Skeleton Key to Vaseem Khan’s transporting The Lost Man of Bombay; and Lisa Jewell’s gripping The Family Remains to the unstoppable debut The Maid by Nita Prose. What a spectacular year for crime fiction! We had some very lively discussions narrowing down the shortlists – now to the readers to pick the winners!’ 

The inaugural Fingerprint Awards, hosted last year at Capital Crime, saw Sarah Pearse named Crime Book of the Year 2021 with The Sanatorium, S.A Cosby named Thriller of the Year 2021 with Razorblade Tears and Laura Purcell named Historical Crime Book of the Year 2021 with The Shape of Darkness. Abigail Dean was named Debut Book of the Year 2021 for Girl A and The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson, narrated by Amanda Redman, won Audiobook Book of the Year 2021. The Industry Award of the Year was awarded to HarperCollins for Girl A, and the Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded posthumously to Thalia Proctor. 

Across three days, Capital Crime 2023 promises a weekend full of fun, innovation and celebration of crime fiction, bringing together readers, authors, industry figures and the local community for the first major literary festival held on the site. Over 100 leading voices from crime fiction will be taking part in a range of panel events for attendees, including Richard Osman, Kate Atkinson, Richard Armitage, Dorothy Koomson, Sally Wainwright, Yomi Adegoke, Peter James and Joanne Harris. The full programme was announced on Tuesday 27th June, and can be found here. 

Sitting outside in the shade and reading The Hiking Book From Hell / Hyttebok frå helvete I am and feel really close to the nature. Seagulls screaming their heads off above me, mosquitoes having a huge hectic meeting around me. Dry grass, hot air, not a drop of rain; exhausted spiders. Not a mountain in sight but plenty of mountainous talk and thoughts in Are Kalvø’s love / hate (or is it indifference at first?) letter to the Norwegian nature which is here symbolised by hills, peaks, hiking, walking, reaching and admiring mountains. Are Kalvø, one of Norway’s leading comedians and satirists, has worked in standup for over twenty-five years. He has produced prize-winning musicals, reviews, an opera, and almost a dozen books. He often writes about things he doesn’t know much about. This is the first time that he is also writing about something he doesn’t understand. Even though he grew up in the picture-postcard perfect beauty of Western Norway he never became a true man of nature. He moved to the city, embraced the new urban life, and never looked back: ‘City folk go out into nature to find inner peace. Country folk go out into nature to shoot things.’

‘Sometime around his forties, Are Kalvø starts losing his friends… to the mountains. Friends who used to meet him at the pub are now hiking and skiing every weekend, and when they do show up, all they talk about is feeling at one with nature (without a hint of irony). When Are realizes he’s the only person who hasn’t posted a selfie on a mountain, he starts to wonder: does he have it all wrong? To find out, Are buys some ridiculously expensive gear and heads into the woods. The result of his sardonic trek is at once a smart and funny take-down of outdoors culture, and a reluctant surrender to nature’s undeniable pull. An adventure, a comedy, and a tragedy.’

Before I try to encourage you to read this book (not an example of crime fiction though death occurs in the hills, too), published by Gresytone in 2022, I must say that it seems as the translator Lucy Moffatt had much fun while working on it. The sentences flow, the words sparkle, the mood of bewilderment and curiosity is present on every page. Not to mention various nerd-type facts and opinions. I have heard the author in action, on TV only, and I bet your high quality be-all and end-all hiking boots and the latest ‘air transport’ jacket that his Norwegian voice and mannerisms are conveyed in English in the most authentic manner. I couldn’t stop laughing; questioned his comments, agreed with his reasoning, kept checking the map of Norway, and wondered where exactly he is going with his quest to understand the national hiking passion. A passion that represents one of the fundamental values in the Norwegian psyche. At first Kalvø doesn’t really care about outdoors: ‘There are three things in the world I really struggle to understand. Religion. Hard drugs. And outdoor life.’ He is not keen on carrying tons of trekking equipment and staying in rustic (obviously) uncomfortable cabins with weird names, then he decides to find out and explore the near-mythical feeling that apparently is then interpreted into loads of inspirational quotes and breathtaking photos on Instagram. He realises that yes, nature is indeed stunning and powerful. But you will have to dig into the experiences he describes, hour by hour, kilometer by kilometer, and which show the modern Norway in its most classic phase which has been developing in the last thirty to forty years.

I could quote whole witty and sensible passages. And I will… but not much. Just think about this Svalbard summary: ‘And let there be no doubt whatsoever about this: it was much more fun telling people about the dogsledding trip at the pub than it was actually being on the dogsledding trip. Snow I’ve seen before. Dogs too. And uncoordinated people in big quilted snowsuits. I live right next door to a kindergarten.’

Have you heard of Jotunheimen? The mountainous area of roughly 3,500 square kilometres in southern Norway is part of the long range known as the Scandinavian Mountains. Twenty-nine highest mountains in Norway are all located there, including the 2,469-metre tall mountain Galdhøpiggen. Jotunheimen is THE Holy Grail for the hikers and the nature lovers, and I want to go there, too. I already have super comfortable old hiking boots. This plan from Kalvø’s The Hiking Book from Hell will be useful to remember:

‘1st attempt to Jotunheimen in search of salvation. Purpose of the trip:

• Find inner peace
• Realize how small I am
• Experience something that’s difficult to explain
• Feel a desire to raise my arms to heaven
• Find out whether food and drink taste better, and whether views look better, if you’ve walked a long way
• Talk to, understand, maybe even like people I meet at cabins with peculiar names’

My introduction to David Bowie came through Let’s Dance album which totally blew me away. This was completely opposite to Paul Burston’s opinion who regards this era in Bowie’s career as nothing so special. Bowie saved his life much earlier… But I lived in a different part of the world and in a different type of society, and was not aware of the various difficulties that punctuated lives of people like him. I listened to the same type of music as a teenager yet I was unaware of any nuances, of all colours, various actions and events and what they could have represented. Poland in the ‘80s was grey, steeped in monochrome aura, and what Burston relates did not sound familiar at all. Was it too insulated?

We all have heard the energising song We Can Be Heroes and used these words to make them fit with what we had to do or wanted to achieve. Burston lives them every single day. I knew of him as a crime fiction writer, and his novel The Closer I Get (Orenda Books 2019), inspired by real-life events, was quite a revelation of twisty unsettling emotions and compulsive behaviours. His autobiography covers all relevant themes of the times; music, art, culture – and activism, politics, social challenges and social changes, and the incredible personal experiences, shaped by the simple fact that he’s gay and acutely aware of what is going on around him, combined with the strong sense for social justice. There are joy and happiness, also pain and shame. Most of all there are passion and honesty: ‘In 2007 I turned forty-two and launched my own literary salon. Polari was the culmination of everything I’d ever done. It was me accommodating my pasts within my persona – drama student, theatre practitioner, activist, journalist, author and shameless exhibitionist.’ We Can Be Heroes will resonate with so many readers, will bring memories, and start discussions, whatever their upbringing, identity or sexual orientation. The book opens eyes as the author shares all: blood, sweat and tears. And for that I’m grateful.

Paul Burston is curator and host of award-winning LGBTQ+ literary salon Polari and founder of the Polari Prize book awards for LGBTQ+ writers, based at the British Library. In 2016, he featured in the British Council’s Global List of ’33 visionary people promoting freedom, equality and LGBT rights around the world’. A Rainbow List National Treasure, he is one of the subjects of Alexis Gregory’s critically acclaimed verbatim play Riot Act, which celebrates generations of gay activism from the Stonewall Riots to the present day.

Before turning to journalism, Paul was an AIDS activist with ACT UP London and regularly risked arrest by blocking traffic, occupying the offices of the Australian Embassy and catapulting condoms over the walls of Pentonville Prison. He was arrested many times and stood trial at Bow Street magistrates court, where he was acquitted. He also worked for the Gay London Policing Group, GALOP, taking calls from men who’d been queer bashed or arrested for consensual sexual offences.  His first ever commission as a freelance journalist was a profile of trans film-maker Kristiene Clarke. In 1990 he became Gay Editor at City Limits and in 1993 became LGBT Editor at Time Out, where he worked for 20 years, documenting the changing cultural and political landscape. Nominated for a Stonewall Award for his journalism, in 2008 he accepted the award for Publication of the Year for the magazine’s LGBTQ+ coverage. A founding editor of Attitude magazine, Paul’s writing has also appeared in the Guardian, the Sunday Times and many other publications. He has also written and presented documentaries for Channel 4 and is a regular contributor to TV and radio.

We Can Be Heroes is his story of growing up in small town Wales, and escaping to London to find sanctity in the vibrant and growing LGBTQ+ community. But this community wasn’t the safe haven he hoped for, as it became decimated by AIDS. From activist, to journalist, to leading LGBTQ+ literary figure, and everything in between, this is Paul’s candid, revealing and emotional memoir of endurance, time and time again. Emotional but often witty, We Can Be Heroes is an illuminating memoir of the eighties, nineties and noughties from a gay man who only just survived them.

‘This is insane,’ I said.

‘I know, right?’

I had thought the view further down had been spectacular, but this was something else. I could see across the whole valley. The trio of mighty glaciers, crowned with ice. The green foothills of the mountains that gave way to the stony valley floor, the river gleaming in the sun. Turning to the south I could see all the way to the coast, a sliver of blue on the far horizon. It was like something from Tolkien. A morbid thought entered my head: when I died, I would be happy to have my ashes scattered here. I’d seen the beaches of Thailand, the forests of California, Tokyo lit up at night from the top of a skyscraper. But this beat all of them.

‘Here,’ Helena said. ‘This is the perfect spot.’

As I’d been marvelling at the beauty around me, Helena had made her way over to the edge of the ridge. Loose rocks lay at her feet; to her left, a boulder came up to her waist.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Be careful.’

Behind her, the rocks gave way to thin air. Just looking at the drop, at the nothingness beyond the ridge, gave me that feeling in my belly like I’d gone over a bump in the road.

‘It’s fine.’ She held out her phone. ‘Take my picture and then I’ll take one of you.’

I removed my gloves, tucking them into my jacket pocket, and took the phone from her. She stood at the edge of the cliff, facing me. I held up the phone, centring her in the frame, and paused. The backdrop was postcard-perfect, but Helena was still the most beautiful part of this picture. The colour in her cheeks. The pale blue of her eyes. My skin tingled beneath my coat and I felt a little shiver of anticipation, thinking about getting back to the hut, taking off our hats and gloves and—

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘What’s taking so long?’

I smiled to myself.

‘Okay, done,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Wait. Let me see.’ She stepped forward and flicked through the pictures. ‘My face looks weird. How can it look weird in all of them?’

‘Helena, your face does not look weird. It’s the exact opposite of weird.’

‘Which is?’

‘Um. Wonderful?’

She rolled her eyes but looked pleased. ‘Can you take a few more?’

I couldn’t shake the sensation of vertigo. The wind was so strong, and the ground so uneven, that although there might not have been any yellow danger signs around, they were flashing inside my head.

‘Please, humour me, okay?’

We were having to raise our voices to be heard above the wind.

‘All right. One more quick batch of pictures and then we go down,’ I said. ‘I don’t—’

‘Fine then, whatever,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to do it, I’ll take a selfie.’ She marched towards the cliff edge.

I was frozen for a second. Was she being reckless, or was I being a drag? Either way, was it worth our first argument since we’d rekindled our relationship?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, going after her.

Helena stopped and turned. ‘It’s fine. I just don’t like being told what to do. Lee was always . . .’ She shook her head and said, ‘Come on, take the photo.’

She stepped back up to the cliff edge, a footstep away from the precipice, and turned towards me, the smile back in place, stretching her arms out like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. I stood about ten metres away from her, so I could capture some sense of the scale of this place in the photo.

What happened next took no more than three seconds. But looking back, as I sometimes do now when I’m unable to sleep, I see it unfolding in slow motion. The beginning of all that followed.

As I took the final photo, the phone positioned in front of my face, a gust of wind blasted my back, knocking me a step forward. Something black flew into the frame of the camera – one of my gloves; the gust of wind must have dislodged it from where it hung from my pocket – and it flew towards Helena.

She reacted instinctively. She brought her hands in protectively and stepped backwards as the glove flew into her face, one foot stamping on the ground behind her.

The ground, which crumbled beneath her.

And I watched, helplessly, as she vanished from sight.

An ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances and desperate choices that suddenly have to be made. That’s the premise of Mark Edwards’ latest novel Keep Her Secret. Initially I thought the title referred to ‘her’ being kept hidden, then I realised this never-slowing-down thriller indicates Helena’s secrets. As I got pulled into the twisted perilous story, what became obvious was that sharing a secret, especially a deadly one, impacts anyone who finds out about it.

The fairly ordinary people Matthew and Helena met at college. After their short-lived romance ended, they haven’t seen each other for twenty years. School reunion brought them together again, and suddenly the feelings were back. He was single and she was a widow. They were free to start again. The exciting impulse sent them on their first holiday together straight to windswept magnificent Iceland. Cosmopolitan Reykjavik, new landscapes, wild ponies, volcanoes, geysers, Thórsmörk, the Valley of Thor, glaciers, mountain hikes, nice travel companions, romance, solid tour guide, happiness. Then trying to take the perfect photo to remember the moment, and mindlessly stepping from the cliff edge without looking. But luckily the fall into the abyss didn’t happen. Instead, hanging off the rock face, Helena, shocked and scarred, made a chilling confession.

Back in England Matthew couldn’t stop feeling giddy with happiness, even though he had unexpectedly lost his job and Helena’s admission made him feel unsettled. He wants to be with her and at the same time he is horrified by what she has done, and the reasons that had led to a very drastic action. He understands ‘why’ and ‘how’ but is not sure if he really knows her. He has reservations about getting deeply involved. Then again, surely, they can deal with any past and present issues together… However, they didn’t expect that someone overheard their conversation and now plans to blackmail Helena who still lives in a stunning house on the coast, drives Tesla and enjoys all the small luxuries left after her husband Lee’s death. Of course, ‘enjoyment’ is the word used by those who cannot see what’s behind the wall of guilt, grief and pain. Handsome arrogant Lee was also at the same college as the unfortunate post-Iceland Bonnie and Clyde, and notorious for ‘same smirk, that same air of being superior to everyone else’ he had known how to control people.

As Matthew begins to understand what’s happening when Devon (yes! That name is meant to confuse everyone) turns up at Helena’s home, demands money in return for silence, and in the process sends the couple into the down spiral of events that expose their sense of security, their moral compasses, and their reasoning. There seems to be no stopping of new threats and events that like a domino push Matthew and Helena into ever greater danger. Faced with a question whether anyone should approach police and just deal with consequences, no one wants to make that step. Who’s guilty, who’s reasonable? Do people deserve what comes to them?

Flawed characters, complex plots and relentless tension are Edwards’ trademarks and in Keep Her Secret they again create an intense flowing story of trust and betrayal, and of decisions to protect someone we love. Feelings like horror, fear and thrill mix in the unsettling emotional cocktail.

‘Yes, we were compassionate, reasonable people who had found themselves in a terrible mess. We weren’t coldblooded murderers or kidnappers. We were good people. That was why Helena, who kept telling me to get a grip, appeared to be losing her own grip. She wasn’t some cold, calculating killer. This kindness was the real Helena.’

Keep Her Secret is out now. Thank you to FMcM Associates for the invitation to join the blog tour, and for the opportunity to get so stressed and worried about this modern couple.

Sunshine in its sudden summer glory, immense beautiful sky, greenery everywhere and some stubborn snow on the ground because it’s still May. So many people. Smiling, drinking coffee, eating chocolate, then walking towards a small clearing in the forest which became a quiet but powerful symbol of current unstable times and of the unknown future. We don’t know what kind of future it will be or whether there will be a future. And for whom? How will the world / the globe evolve in the next decades? Can we predict or expect anything at all? However, the uncertain is a part of the appealing mystery of the Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s 100-year living artwork, a project which started in 2014 and which grows and changes naturally each year and each season from the moment the first of a thousand trees has been planted in Nordmarka, a forest just outside Oslo. In 2114 the trees will be cut, pulped, turned into paper. The idea of an anthology containing one hundred texts, unread and unpublished until then, seems both radical and super cool, relaxing. The physical books made from trees grown in our time will be printed for the new generation. Before that materializes, a writer is invited to contribute a text each year.

Last Sunday an international crowd gathered at the meeting point to walk together to this special place. Writers, translators, enthusiasts, readers, council workers, adults, children and dogs. Marianne Borgen, the Mayor of City of Oslo, and Anne Beate Hovind, Chair of the Trust. Amongst the estimated four hundred people there was also The Crown Princess Mette-Marit (Fremtidsbiblioteket – Det norske kongehus), who joined this year’s authors on their forest walk, is an ambassador for Norwegian literature abroad, and takes a special interest in this topic. Her dog, on the other hand, wasn’t that concerned about handover ceremony and all this quiet sitting on the ground…

The author invited to contribute a text for 2023 is Judith Schalansky. She was born in 1980 Greifswald in former East Germany and studied art history and communication design. She works as a writer and a book designer in Berlin, where she is also the curator of a prestigious natural list. Her work has been widely acclaimed and translated into more than 25 languages. She has been awarded The Most Beautiful German Book of the Stiftung Buchkunst twice: in 2009 for the international bestseller Atlas of Remote Islands and in 2011 for The Giraffe’s Neck. The Outer Main-belt asteroid 95247 Schalansky (asteroid!) was named after her. In 2021 she was awarded the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for the book An Inventory of Losses. During the simple handover ritual, and later at the Deichman Library, Judith Schalansky talked about her understanding and meaning of a forest which is a place of transition and transformation; a place which nobody leaves unchanged. To go into the forest means to go to another space and this process forces people to be open to a new experience. We know many stories both for children and adults where such ventures had a profound effect on lives.

Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong, an award-winning poet, essayist and novelist born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, was chosen for the year 2020. Pandemic and then covid got in the way and he couldn’t travel to Norway before. Ocean Vuong lives in Massachusetts where he serves as an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst. He is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a recipient of a 2019 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, and the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Ocean Vuong’s initial Future Library thoughts revolved around a big question: what can anyone write that would be worthy and deserving of future? This project is so hopeful and with blind faith, that it demands all of us to commit.

What I found fascinating was that both Judith Schalansky and Ocean Vuong think so much about death but not in the traditional scary way. According to Schalansky death is the last taboo: an unknown empty space, a precondition for everything else, and everyone signed this particular contract simply by being born because that’s what awaits. Vuong considers death to be a special kind of archive which contains language, the oldest powerful technology used by humans to convince others to live or die, to protect or destroy. And all language is political but not inherently violent; not good or bad, it is just a tool.

The Future Library / Framtidsbiblioteket authors cannot say what their writing is about; but they are allowed to reveal a title. Ocean Vuong’s text is named King Philip. Judith Schalansky’s work is called Fluff and Splinters: A Chronicle. Surprising, intriguing and so tempting to speculate which these works might be about.

What next? Same place, same time next year. New author, new title, new thoughts. Same old forest taking care of itself and of its surroundings, of new trees. There is hope and expectation. There are connections between people who are fascinated by this unique art project and by the raw clean power of nature. Future Library as a concept is in progress. Manuscripts are kept in the specially designed glass boxes in a physical space at the Oslo’s public library. The Trust has responsibility to the next generations. Oslo City Council granted permission for using the space and secured legal protection of the area for the benefits of the Trust. Future Library as the real experience is accessible to all: the Silent Room in Deichman Bjørvika Library is free to enter. The forest is just a forest where people and animals are welcome any time. I’m getting philosophical… You must visit the Future Library Forest. Bring your coffee and a sandwich, and enjoy the singing silence.

I had an enormous pleasure to hear from Don Bartlett and Victoria Cribb about their translation experiences. Now, Anne Bruce takes us on the journey from reading a Norwegian book in the original to translating it into English.

‘I was a fan before I was a translator. As a reader, I came late to crime fiction, and soon headed in the direction of Nordic Noir, starting with Miss Smilla and moving on through Wallander and Martin Beck to the Norwegian writers I could access in the original – my favourites then being Gunnar Staalesen and Anne Holt. My voracious consumption of translated titles as well as writers not yet translated into English prompted a (perhaps naïve!) belief that this was something I could do, turning my love of the Norwegian language into a practical endeavour that would benefit other readers as well as myself. And so, a translator was born.

I bought and read a few of Gunnar’s crime novels on a visit to the Norwegian book town of Fjærland and went on to read his truly impressive Bergen Trilogy (now a quartet), set in one of my favourite Scandinavian cities and involving a crime and mystery across the time frame of an entire century. I was keen to pitch this to UK publishers but found little interest in such a magnum opus. I went on to try my hand at sample translations and received generous support and encouragement from the staff at NORLA, the Norwegian government’s agency for Norwegian literature abroad as well as Gyldendal’s publishing house in Oslo.

One of the first new writers I came across was Jørn Lier Horst, not yet published in English, but already making a name for himself in Scandinavian crime fiction. As an enthusiastic newly fledged translator, I was keen to help by translating excerpts, blurbs and reviews in an effort to persuade UK publishers to pick up his books. In 2011, Sandstone Press in Scotland agreed to publish Dregs, number six in the Wisting series but the first of his novels to be translated into English. The book garnered positive reviews, and one of the first bloggers to write in glowing terms and go on to champion the author’s writing was Petrona, aka Maxine Clarke, whose particular focus was ‘intelligent crime fiction from around the world’. Her reviews were always astute and insightful, so accolades from her were highly prized.

The series continued in English, with Closed for Winter, which won the Riverton Prize in Norway, and The Hunting Dogs marking a real breakthrough by winning the Nordic Glass Key Award. Both enhanced Horst’s reputation as a masterly exponent of Norwegian crime, underpinned by his wealth of knowledge of the police and their procedures as a former chief inspector himself. He says himself ‘Not many people are allowed behind the police barricades, and that’s my advantage. I’ve been to many crime scenes. It’s where I like to bring my readers. And at crime scenes I often met people who were victims of crimes, or those left behind in murder cases. My job was to talk to them. I came face-to-face with anger, grief, despair, and I think that’s what brings an authentic spark to my books.’ As his translator, I’ve been able to follow the progression of the writing and the characters over the years. The thorniest problems with the translation have, oddly enough, come from the titles rather than the text. Some of the English titles are completely different from the Norwegian ones – Blindgang became Ordeal, Det innerste rommet became The Cabin, Ilvilje became The Inner Darkness and Sak 1569 is published as A Question of Guilt. There was some discussion of how to translate Jakthundene some years ago, but when I realized the title also referred to a constellation of stars, it had to be The Hunting Dogs.

By this time, Maxine had sadly died and the Petrona Award was inaugurated in 2013 in her honour and memory. Of course, given her early backing for the Wisting novels, it was especially gratifying that the fourth book in the English series, The Caveman, was awarded the prize in 2016. I like to think Maxine would have approved!

Since then, of course, Jørn and his hero Wisting have gone on to the dizzy heights of TV fame (The Caveman featured in the first Wisting TV series) and the Petrona Award judges rewarded his prolific output with a second prize in 2019, this time for The Katharina Code. One of the aspects of Jørn’s Wisting series that particularly appealed to me was the Stavern setting, familiar from holiday visits, and Wisting’s foray to Hamburgsund in The Caveman had special resonance too, as I had just holidayed on the west coast of Sweden, part of a trip that took in Wallander’s Ystad and Läckberg’s Fjällbacka. Of course, Line’s trip in the novel was rather more dramatic!

That holiday in 2013 also included a visit to Fredrikstad and the walled ramparts of its Old Town, so it was a genuine pleasure to find this featured in the next Wisting novel I translated, The Hunting Dogs. (Was Wisting dogging my footsteps as I was dogging his?) I had even gone into the Libris bookshop across from the postbox in the wall that gives Line an aha moment so crucial to the plot. In fact, I bought and immediately read Anne Holt’s controversial latest book, What Dark Clouds Hide – little did I know then that I would translate it some time later! These holiday connections also bring to mind one of my favourite Anne Holt quotes: I always say that if you’re visiting a country you’ve never been to before, you should buy a crime novel from the place and an interiors magazine. Those two things will tell you more about that country than any travel guide. Too true!

The success of the early Wisting translations led to me being invited by Simon & Schuster of New York to translate Anne Holt’s Hanne Wilhelmsen crime novels. They had decided to publish the whole series from the start in light of the recent success of 1222 in the prestigious Edgar Awards. As a great fan of the books, I was over the moon, and I relished translating these increasingly complex, often dark, thrillers with political intrigue and social criticism at their heart, in the true spirit of Nordic Noir and Martin Beck. In fact, the English translation by Marlaine Delargy was made from Maj Sjöwall’s translation of the book into Swedish, so yet another link to the roots of Scandi crime! The first of my translations was Blessed are Those who Thirst, and the series ended in English with book 10, In Dust and Ashes, though The Eleventh Manuscript has now been published in Norway and book 12 is forthcoming. Continuing to combine holiday travels with translation research, in 2014 I went for a long walk around the east end of Oslo, not normally part of the tourist trail, visiting all the locations from the Hanne Wilhelmsen series. I even called in at Police Headquarters, Grønlandsleiret 44. No one batted an eyelid as I went in, looked around in the foyer and took photographs of the location and the hanging artwork that Hanne ridicules so often!  

Anne’s next series, with Selma Falck as the lead character, was bang up to date with its focus on the world of celebrity and social media, and the second book in the short series, A Necessary Death, caught the attention of the Petrona Award judges and was shortlisted in 2021.

In the meantime, Jørn Lier Horst had embarked on another series, this time with writing partner Thomas Enger, and the first book in this new series was also shortlisted for the Petrona in 2021.

I never did get to translate any of Gunnar Staalesen’s books but can recommend colleague Don Bartlett’s translations of his Varg Veum series. And in fact, I did encounter Varg in one of Anne Holt’s novels – her famous sense of fun is given free rein in the playful links she introduced to her otherwise deadly-serious narratives and I was delighted to see Hanne meet up with Varg in The Lion’s Mouth. Other tie-ins can be spotted by eagle-eyed readers when Hanne makes an appearance in Death in Oslo, part of the Johanne Vik series, when Adam Stubo turns up in Offline, and when Henrik Holme crosses over from What Dark Clouds Hide to Offline and In Dust and Ashes.

Another humorous anecdote connected to Gunnar’s novels is also related to the perils of translation. I’ve often been asked – ‘Do you just put it all through Google Translate?’ I was a bit taken aback when I first heard this, because anyone who has used a digital translator would know that it leads to some spectacularly awful renditions. One I came across was in a newspaper article about Gunnar Staalesen, which mentioned one of his earliest novels, Bukken til havresekken, and stated that it ‘translates, enigmatically, as Goat of Geese’! The journalist had obviously used Google Translate and been led into a howler of an error. For once, I made an online comment correcting the mistake – the book would be called in English Cat among the Pigeons or Fox among the Geese, to come closer to the reporter’s version, but I see on checking it again recently that the uncorrected version is still on the website!

Looking back, it’s clear that my career as a translator has been closely connected with the Petrona Award over the ten years of its existence – its creation gave a tremendous fillip to translated Scandinavian crime fiction and a real boost to the status of translators. A heartfelt thanks to the founders, judges and supporters for that!’   

Victoria Cribb (MA, Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, and History, University of Cambridge; MA, Scandinavian Studies, UCL; BPhil, Icelandic as a Foreign Language, University of Iceland) spent a number of years travelling, studying and working in Iceland before becoming a full-time translator in 2002.

She has translated more than forty books by Icelandic authors including Sjón, Arnaldur Indriðason, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Ragnar Jónasson, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, Gyrðir Elíasson and Andri Snær Magnússon, and poetry by Gerður Kristný. A number of these works have been nominated for prizes. In 2021 her translation of Eva Björg Ægisdóttir’s The Creak on the Stairs became the first translation to win the UK Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award, and her translation of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s The Silence of the Sea won the UK’s 2015 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Other nominations include being long-listed three times for the US Best Translated Book Award (Fiction), and twice for the PEN America Translation Prize, both most recently in 2019 with CoDex 1962 by Sjón.Another of her Sjón translations, In the Mouth of the Whale, was short-listed for the UK’s 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Sjón’s work in English (and other languages) has been recognised all around the world and it led to the author being invited to contribute a piece of work to be included in the Future Library project.

In 2017 Victoria Cribb received the Orðstír honorary translation award in recognition of her contribution to the translation of Icelandic literature. She now lives in Vienna, Austria, and knows exactly how to scare an editor. Below is her foolproof suggestion.

‘Translation can be a lonely job. You sit there for months, wrestling with words, your only company a book and a laptop (I am not one of those fortunate translators who has a cat to assist or, more likely, hinder their efforts). Apart from the occasional e-mail exchange with the author or editor, or attempt to pick my other half’s brains (‘What do we call those round thingummies in English?’ — ‘I have no idea.’ — ‘Ah, good, so it’s not just me losing my marbles, then?’), I am alone with the text. So I’m hugely grateful to Nordic Noir bloggers like Ewa, who not only read our books but share their enthusiasm with others, and to the organisers of the Petrona Award, who make us feel that our work might actually be worthy of praise.

I first became aware of the Petrona Award when my translation of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s The Silence of the Sea won it in 2015. As it happens, this was the first of her books I had worked on. Two things struck me immediately: Yrsa was funny and Yrsa was good at generating fear – not an easy combination to pull off. There is a tendency among English speakers to think of Nordic literature as unremittingly bleak, but Yrsa is always aware of the comedy inherent in the human condition. In The Silence of the Sea, it is particularly evident in the relationship between the central character, Thóra, and her baleful receptionist, the ironically named Bella. When I told Yrsa that Bella was my favourite character, I was delighted to learn that she was based on a real person.

But my abiding memory of this book is just how much research Yrsa had given me to do. One strand of the story is set on board a luxury yacht. Although I grew up on Arthur Ransome, have read the entire Patrick O’Brian Aubrey series and countless other works about ships and the sea, nautical language remains incredibly difficult to get right. I spent hours trawling the internet for articles and adverts about super yachts, and poring over the thesaurus for different ways to say ‘opulent’. I had to learn all about radar, and NAVTEX and VHF radio. I wandered the lanes of Lisbon with the help of Google Street View to find out what the cobbles looked like. I puzzled over the arcana of scuba-diving equipment, and bombarded Yrsa with pictures of freight containers, demanding to know which one she had in mind.

I am always on my mettle to solve as many problems as I can before I pester the author for explanations, aware that they have many other calls on their time, but with this book I was lucky enough to meet Yrsa in person. I remember querying some detail, thinking I was being clever, only to be silenced by Yrsa’s answer that she had tried out the activity for herself. Here was someone who took her research seriously. Instead of relying on Google like me, she had been out there, scuba diving and visiting the bridge of a trawler (she was unable to drum up a super yacht).

Since then, I’ve translated another nine novels by Yrsa, always grateful for the humour and generally rooting for the animals (if anyone’s going to survive the bloodbath, let it be the dog or cat). My biggest concern is usually about preserving the fear factor. I’m a terrible coward myself, often so badly spooked by the Icelandic original that I can’t continue reading after dark or when I’m alone in the house. But once I’m working on the translation, I have the opposite problem: the work ceases to be scary at all. Disaster! I become convinced that I’ve ruined it. After I handed in The Silence of the Sea, I remember my relief when the editor e-mailed me to say she’d been so frightened by the bit where the ghostly voice speaks through the ship’s radio that she’d had to stop reading and go and make a cup of tea to calm her nerves.

Yrsa and I have got a new horror novel called The Prey coming out in the UK in October 2023. I sincerely hope that it too will have readers reaching for their kettles.’  

God Påske 🐥Happy Easter 🐣. Petrona Award translators – part 1.

The current (Raven Crime Reads, Euro Crime, Nordic Lighthouse and Nordic Noir) and past Petrona Award are celebrating 10^th anniversary of Petrona Award this year. Last December Margot Kinberg wrote a moving tribute In memory of Maxine Clarke.

Maxine’s memory is preserved in reading, writing about, discussing and enjoying crime fiction from Scandinavian countries, translated into English. In the spirit of Påskekrim and to celebrate translators whose work contributed so much to popularise Scandinavian literature, including crime fiction, I want to present eight translators whose incredible work – masterful craftsmanship, sensitivity, hard graft, feeling for the language and understanding the context of the book in both cultures – made it possible for literature to cross international linguistic bridges. 

A couple of days ago I heard Gunnar Staalesen on the radio. He was talking about Påskekrim tradition that started a hundred years ago, so I decided that the first translator to be presented here is the legendary Don Bartlett. I am not exaggerating. In 2016 Don Bartlett was awarded the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit in rank of Knight, class I for his formidable efforts as a translator of Norwegian literature. Several of the authors whose books Don have translated, often point out that Don’s contribution in many cases has been one of “co-writing” and rendering the book, rather than translating it. Don translates from Danish and Norwegian mainly, but he also knows Swedish and German.I won’t summarise all his achievements here but would like to reach for one or several novels by Karl Ove Knausgård (My Struggle tomes), Jo Nesbø, Gunnar Staalesen, Kjell Ola Dahl, Roy Jacobsen. The list is exciting and huge indeed. 

Here’s what Don says about the translation process. 

‘Maxine Clark and Karen Meek were the first crime fiction ‘bloggers’ I ever met. So I write this with a nod of warm appreciation to them. When I talked to Maxine & Karen – a good twenty years ago – I used the term ‘blogger’ with some trepidation. I still wasn’t 100% sure what a blog was and didn’t want to understate or overstate its value. I remember asking for and receiving a comprehensive explanation. Now I know, Ewa, we can all relax. And this is a kind of blog.

At the moment I am in the middle of translating Gunnar Staalesen’s latest novel, ‘latest’ in the sense of the ‘next’ Staalesen for Orenda, because the original came out in Norway in 2002. I know Varg Veum pretty well now as I have translated nine of Gunnar’s novels (seven for Orenda; two for Arcadia) and this will be the tenth. I am into double figures and still a big fan. 

I have just finished the first draft of my translation and would like to tell you what is going through my head. First, there is the title: Som i et speil, literally translated  ‘As In A Mirror’. This makes perfect sense in terms of the plot – it is very accurate – but to my mind, and the publisher’s, it doesn’t flow or attract. I have come up with an alternative, which flows better, and I am still mulling it over with respect to the places where this phrase comes up in the novel and the various contexts. At present, I think it works, but that could change as I go through more drafts. 

The first draft is really a rough and ready translation, with several bits in red, where I have to check the geography or cultural details, or I am not happy with my interpretation / translation, and may have to check with Gunnar. He is always happy to help, and a very good sounding board, but I prefer not to disturb him unless it is absolutely necessary. After all, this novel first appeared quite a few years ago, and his mind will be on his new publication this year. 

However, I have to confess I was intrigued by a jazz tune that is mentioned early in the novel. I knew Gunnar was playing on one of its associations, but I was unsure which. So I did ask, and it turned out it was a geographical allusion. Good job I asked. It wouldn’t have been my first guess, but this shows the immense value of having Gunnar there.

The next draft is the one I enjoy most as I begin to nail down who characters are and how they speak. I find myself muttering things like ‘No, no, no, Berit wouldn’t say that. She’s more in-your-face, confrontational.’ And I am clear now about what the ingredients of this novel are. Some Varg Veum novels bristle with cultural and geographical references. This one has a clear Bergen setting, but Gunnar’s focus is very much on the characters and the plot. And there is a narrative technique he hasn’t used before. I have to make sure it works in English as well as it does in Norwegian. Usually at the second stage I go back over jokes or idioms or puns I have highlighted in red. There are not so many in this particular novel, but there is still enough to chew on. I am still a long way from polishing what I have done. Deadline: June 2023.’

The latest novel by Gunnar Staalesen is due to be published later this year by Orenda Books.

Keera Duggan was building a solid reputation as a Seattle prosecutor, until her romantic relationship with a senior colleague ended badly. Now, returning to her family’s failing criminal defence law firm to work for her father is her only option. But with the right moves, maybe she can restore the family’s reputation, her relationship with her father, and her career.

Keera’s chance to establish herself comes when she’s retained by Vince LaRussa, an investment adviser accused of murdering his wealthy wheelchair-bound wife Anne. There is little hard evidence against him, but considering the couple’s impending and potentially nasty divorce, LaRussa faces life in prison. The prosecutor is equally challenging: Miller Ambrose, Keera’s former lover, eager to destroy her in court on her first homicide defence. But as a competitive former chess prodigy, Keera is confident that she can outmanoeuvre him. 

As Keera and her team start digging, they uncover more than they bargained for. Keera is sure that LaRussa did not kill his wife, but she is starting to suspect that he is not an innocent man. With duty to her client, her family’s legacy, and her own future to consider, she’s caught in a deadly game…

‘Clients don’t need heroes. They need competent, well reasoned representation. Remember. Evaluate and consider before you make a move. Don’t rush. And don’t let your desire to win influence the moves you make.’

Many years ago I was summoned to do jury service. Twice. The first time it was an attempted murder trial. As I and other jury members listened to the evidence and witnesses’ statements, we managed to come to a conclusion that was reasonable and logical. But that’s my whole experience from the criminal court: even when I completed law degree, my intention was to deal with totally different matters. Alas, that did not exactly happen. And it’s another story.

Getting to know Keera Duggan, her personality and methodological thinking in the latest book by Robert Dugoni was a blast. Of course, British and American legal systems differ significantly. What we might have seen in the films and TV series give us an overview but can we really say that we observe all nuances and lingo, the strategies and games? Well, Dugoni is a master of presenting all that and as he sets seemingly simple tale in motion, he captures the readers’ attention and imagination. He asks questions, makes them think, pulls them inside the story.

The riddle in which Mary is found dead beside a table and an open window. There’s glass on the floor and a puddle of water. The autopsy determines Mary died of shock and loss of oxygen. What happened?

What I enjoyed so much in Her Deadly Game was the constant comparison of the legal preparation to the game of chess. Keera was a child prodigy and still played chess to unwind, gather her thoughts and relax. She also needed mental stimulation. Her mind is brilliant, and her game on and off the court room, can be deadly yet she remains a likeable character, flawed and human, and mindful of all good advice from her father Patsy, also known as Irish Brawler. ‘Focus on the problem before you.’ At times that becomes difficult and infuriating, especially as the arrogant prosecutor Miller Ambrose, his ego bruised by being dumped, wants at all costs to win the case and to humiliate her. That’s when more advice comes in: ‘Opponents make mistakes. Play defense but look for that moment to attack. Games can change with one move, sometimes in an instant. So can trials.’

Keera is fully aware of the dangers ready to catch the committed lawyers: ‘Most people didn’t understand that some days, the good lawyers spent every waking moment thinking about their cases. It explained why so many lawyers were divorced or had addiction issues. The law, she had been told, more than once, was a jealous mistress.’ Her own family wasn’t immune: Her father, she knew, had envisioned the firm to someday be Patrick Duggan & Sons, but her two older brothers, Shawn and Michael, had chosen only one of their father’s passions – drinking, though Michael had been sober for fifteen years.’ Hence Patrick Duggan & Associates became Patsy Duggan and his daughters: Ella, Margaret and Keera. A team that focused completely on their work.

Her Deadly Game is a slick, exciting novel. Intelligent and fast-paced. Sparkling with logical practical wit, verbal duels and sharp dialogues, and on top of all this; with literary references. The intricate web of puzzle pieces are impossible to put into a coherent yet surprising picture until they actually fall in place, and the truth appears before the defence counsel and the very hard-working detectives. Here I need to mention the brilliantly portrayed professional relationship between Keera and Detective Frank Rossi of Seattle Violent Crimes: respectful, knowledgeable of law and its limitations, and understanding of how the system works. They are both aware that it is not the best but it mostly works in the current situation.

The culmination of defence in the controversial LaRussa case, involving intense work behind the screen, employing a private investigator JP Harrison, checking Anne’s family’s contacts and history, and tracking the mysterious book quotes, is both impressive and astonishing. Keera’s achievement was both at professional and personal level. Without giving away the conclusion one thing was certain: ‘Ambrose did what even the Sunday dinners did not. He’d brought them together, gave them a common enemy, made them a family who stood up for one another, and who cared for one another.’ That clearly indicates that more is coming from Duggans and Dugoni. I do hope so.

Thank you to Sophie Goodfellow of FMcM Associates for the invitation to join the blog tour for Her Deadly Game.

Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon Charts bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite series, which has sold more than eight million books worldwide. He is also the author of the bestselling Charles Jenkins series; the bestselling David Sloane series; the stand-alone novels The 7^th Canon, Damage Control, The World Played Chess, and The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, Suspense Magazine’s 2018 Book of the Year, for which Dugoni won an AudioFile Earphones Award for narration; and the nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary, a Washington Post best book of the year. He is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Book Award for fiction and a three-time winner of the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set in the Pacific Northwest. He is a two-time finalist for the Thriller Awards and the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, as well as a finalist for the Silver Falchion Award for mystery and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards. His books are sold in more than twenty-five countries and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.