Stella Gaitano at the Edinburgh Book Festival

Stella Gaitano is appearing at The Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday 17 August 14.30-15.30.

The event is sub-titledThe Meaning of Homeland

Stella Gaitano’s powerful multi-generational epic, Edo’s Souls, is the first novel from South Sudan to be translated into English. Winner of a 2020 PEN Translation Award, the novel blends historical fiction and folklore, exploring themes of identity, motherhood, and loss against the backdrop of an unfolding civil war. Today, talking with Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Gaitano joins us to reflect on her writing journey and the power of stories.

For further information or to buy tickets go to: www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/stella-gaitano

Stella Gaitano at the Edinburgh Book Festival

Stella Gaitano is appearing at The Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday 17 August 14.30-15.30.

The event is sub-titledThe Meaning of Homeland

Stella Gaitano’s powerful multi-generational epic, Edo’s Souls, is the first novel from South Sudan to be translated into English. Winner of a 2020 PEN Translation Award, the novel blends historical fiction and folklore, exploring themes of identity, motherhood, and loss against the backdrop of an unfolding civil war. Today, talking with Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Gaitano joins us to reflect on her writing journey and the power of stories.

Robert Irwin (1946-2024)

I am very sad to announce that the author, scholar and man of many talents Robert Irwin has died. He was one of the most brilliant and innovative novelists of his generation.

A few Personal Recollections by Eric Lane

I have met a lot of highly intelligent people but few with the originality of Robert Irwin.I was constantly surprised by what he knew and what interested him. In many ways he was a highly learned scholar but few scholars take part in roller-skating marathons, have an interest in pinball machines, could juggle, do conjuring tricks, read a copious amount of pulp fiction and loved shopping. He would have made a good book rep and would return in the early days of Dedalus with large orders from Heffers in Cambridge and Blackwells in Oxford which he repped during his days lecturing there. He championed the writing of Huysmans/Meyrink and created for us an untapped area of publishing with Dedalus by the end of the 1980s becoming the publishers of decadent literature and creating a literary fantasy list which we termed distorted reality.

I first met Robert Irwin in the late 1970s at Morley College Novel Writing Class. Robert was the class genius. He had already written The Arabian Nightmare which was doing the rounds with an agent and was writing a novel about the War of the Roses then called The Dreadlord. It would surface many years later as Wonders Will Never Cease. It had brilliant set scenes but staying true to history all the major characters were murdered a hundred pages before the end. No publisher wanted The Arabian Nightmare or The Dreadlord. There were some exceptional novels being written by members of the class and I expected members of the class to disappear as their work got published. However, like Robert’s novels everything came back rejected. It became apparent that nothing written at the Morley Novel Writing Class would ever get published. It was a very disheartening conclusion.

Eventually I hit on a solution to this problem, I would publish their novels, that is I would form a publishing company which would publish the novels that no one else wanted to publish. I dropped a postcard through Robert Irwin’s letter box – he lived near us announcing the good news and stating that I would make him famous. Robert kept the postcard. I don’t know if I succeeded in making Robert famous it was perhaps the other way round that he succeeded in making Dedalus famous. Robert was very sceptical about this venture but it got underway in 1983. On 30 November 1983 Dedalus published its first list of 3 debut novels which included The Arabian Nightmare followed in February 1984 with our first translations.

Our brilliant beginning for a variety of reasons did not happen and what could go wrong did and we acquired the trade nickname of the Deadloss Publishing Company. Robert was always very sanguine. He would say he had written the best first novel that one had ever reviewed or he had written the best first novel that no one had ever bought. There was great excitement when Hatchards in Piccadilly had sold a copy of The Arabian Nightmare but unfortunately it was later found out of position in the bookshop. We kept trying to get publicity with relaunches and resending review copies.

After six months and the Rebirth of Fiction stunt with a coffin and a model popping out of it on the steps of Time Out in Covent Garden we got our first reviews. The Arabian Nightmare was well reviewed in the same week in Time Out and City Limits. Further review copies were sent out with copies of the reviews which led to a review in The Guardian by Hilary Bailey which described The Arabian Nightmare as ‘particularly brilliant’. Particularly brilliant was a term applied to most books Robert Irwin produced.

Robert Irwin’s second novel The Limits of Vision was in the process of being sold to Penguin for £2,000 and although Dedalus had the rights to the book Penguin was its first publisher in 1986. Penguin tried to buy The Arabian Nightmare for the same amount but with the help of interest from Transworld and a lot of haggling we got Peter Mayer at Penguin up to £21,00 which in 1985 was a serious amount of money for an infant publisher.

The Arabian Nightmare did quite well for Penguin but when it went out of print in 1989 Penguin decided not to reprint and the rights reverted. For Dedalus The Arabian Nightmare has been a major commercial success and we have sold rights in it into twenty different languages and it has received worldwide acclaim. We continued publishing Robert Irwin’s fiction and Exquisite Corpse made the Booker Prize longlist in 19995 with A.S.Byatt campaigned for it to win The Booker Prize. In 1999 we published Satan Wants Me which was for us a major critical and commercial success. More by accident than design Robert Irwin stopped writing fiction leaving various books unfinished and concentrated on non-fiction books on orientalism, the crusades, and aspects of Islamic and Arab culture such as camels, Granada and Islamic art gaining a worldwide reputation as an orientalist and scholar. He became in high demand around the world for conferences and as a lecturer and speaker.
After a gap of 17 years Robert returned to his fiction. He created a highly imaginative plot for The Dreadlord and we published it under the title of Wonders Will Never Cease in 2016. He then finished his novel about German cinema during the Nazi period, My Life is like a Fairy Tale(2019). Despite a cancer diagnosis he continued writing and produced the first two books of a trilogy The Runes Have Been Cast(2021) and Tom’s Version(2023) and was at work on the third volume when he developed a serious infection in April and was rushed to hospital. He died on Friday 28 June 2024.

He will be sorely missed by his wife Helen and his daughter Felicity and her children and many readers and students who encountered his wit and wisdom.

My abiding memory of Robert is when he appeared with Bob Chenciner at our door step in Stockwell during the 1980s on their roller skates, two larger than life characters freewheeling through the streets of South London and life.