"Recently you can’t go to nursery and you can’t go to school, but it’s not like the summer holidays either. The streets are sad and dead, as if everyone had gone travelling. But no one has gone travelling, they’ve just locked themselves away in their flats."
Explaining to a small child why the world has changed so much overnight and what the pandemic and viruses even mean is rather difficult. A Pandemic Tale, this charming and entertaining anecdote of the unfriendly little virus Corona who wanted to conquer the world is a story by acclaimed Hungarian poet and novelist Krisztina Tóth, who wanted to make the topic a little more comprehensible and graspable for her daughter and for all the small children out there. Award-winning translator of Krisztina's other works too, Owen Good will read the tale for the little and the big ones on Monday 29th June at 7pm (BST) / 2pm (EST).
Tune in to watch here:
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Krisztina Tóth is one of the most highly acclaimed Hungarian authors. She has published ten volumes of poetry and seven of prose and has won numerous awards, including the Graves Prize (1996), the József Attila Prize (2000) and the Laureate Prize (2008). Her writing subtly combines strong visual elements, intellectual reflection and an empathic, yet often ironic concern in everyday scenes and conflicts.
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Owen Good is a teacher and translator living in Budapest. His translation of Tóth’s Churning won Asymptote’s 2014 Close Approximations prize for emerging translators.