Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing

CBCP x OIW webinar: Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101
2025-10-23 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London)
‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is a webinar series co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.
On Thursday 23rd October at 5pm UK time we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101, sponsored by The Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.

To join via MS Teams, please register here.

The impact of global events is unmistakably apparent in our daily lives, yet Americans, especially children and teenagers, know little of world events and cultures. Moreover, those best positioned to spark their learning — particularly librarians, who are charged with bringing the knowledge of the world even to their littlest patrons — are ill-equipped to help them. Shockingly, only a handful of accredited U.S. library schools even offer courses in international youth literature.
The Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101 website is intended to serve as a toolkit for librarians, but also for others who wish to learn more about youth literature — especially translations — from other countries. A global collection helps librarians serve communities with families from different countries and cultures, helps children develop greater international understanding, opens avenues for curiosity, and creates opportunities for learning from counterparts abroad.
Used well, these books can open windows, unlock doors, and serve as mirrors. To this end we provide curated booklists created by librarians, subject matter experts, and community contributors in the Starter Kit and aggregate relevant web-based materials in the resource-rich Hub. Together, they are a one-stop shop for the global youth literature novice, and the project leaders hope that even those already familiar with this literature will discover something new.
Speakers:
Dr. Annette Y. Goldsmith is the librarian at the Levy Library, Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Los Angeles. She is the founding editor of the online children’s literature journal, The Looking Glass. An international youth literature specialist, she teaches online graduate classes in children’s and young adult literature and librarianship, most recently for the Kent State University Information School.
Dr. Marc Aronson is Associate Professor of Practice, Library and Information Science, at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. He has worked in the field of literature for younger readers for more than thirty years as an author, editor, speaker, publisher, and critic. He is the only person to have been a winner or finalist for both of the American Library Association’s prizes for excellence in youth nonfiction as both an author and as an editor.

David Jacobson is a journalist, author and Japanese translator. His award-winning picture book biography, Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, introduced the life and work of a beloved Japanese children’s poet to English-language readers. He is currently writing a biography of Jella Lepman, founder of the International Youth Library and the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).

Panel discussion: Bernardine Evaristo in Translation, 5th November 2025
2025-11-05 16:30 - 18:30 | Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL, RG6 6EL
On 6 November 2025, the University of Reading will host an International Symposium on the work of Booker Prize-winning author, Bernardine Evaristo. It will be the first academic symposium dedicated to her work. (For more information about the symposium, click here.)
Before the main symposium begins, a special panel dedicated to discussing Evaristo’s work in translation and adaptation will be held on Wednesday 5 November from 4.30-6.30pm (GMT). Our four international panellists for this event and the titles of their talks are as follows:

“Girl, Woman, Other… Readers: Translation and Reception in Serbia”
Emilija Lipovšek, Academy of Applied Studies Belgrade (Serbia)
“Bernardine Evaristo in Polish: Prototyping inclusivity in translation”
Bartosz Wójcik, Maria Curie Skłodowska University (Poland)
“From Girl, Woman, Other to Dekle, ženska, druga_i: translating gender”
Katja Zakrajsek (Slovenia)
“Translating/Adapting Bernardine Evaristo’s (Short) Fiction: From Identity Fragmentation to a Multimodal Transformative Storytelling of Subversive Liminalities”
Ester Gendusa, University of Palermo (Italy)

Welcome: Professor Daniela La Penna, Head of School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at the University of Reading
Chair: Dr Nicola Abram, University of Reading
The event is free to attend and will be held in person and online.
To register for a ticket to join us in person, click here.
(Please note: The venue for the panel discussion is the Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading, RG6 6EL)
To register for a ticket to join us online, click here.
More information on our speakers:
Emilija Lipovšek Defended doctoral thesis entitled ‘Postcolonial London: City and Identity’ at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, Serbia in 2015. Has participated in a number of international conferences with presentations and published papers on postcolonial authors and novels (including Evaristo’s Lara, Soul Tourists), literary and cultural tourism, industrial cultural heritage. Works as a Senior Lecturer of English Language at the College of Tourism, Academy of Applied Studies Belgrade, Serbia and has held several seminars on postcolonial literature at the University of Bamberg in Germany.
Bartosz Wójcik is the author of Afro-Caribbean Poetry in English: Cultural Traditions (2015) and a member of the Polish Literary Translators Association (http://stl.org.pl/profil/bartosz-wojcik/). Published translations of prose include Diana McCaulay (Jamaica), Kevin Jared Hosein (Trinidad and Tobago), and Nathan McCall (USA), as well as poetry by Lauren K. Alleyne (Trinidad / USA), Jacqueline Bishop (Jamaica), Stewart Brown (UK), Carol Ann Duffy (UK), Salena Godden (UK), Joy Harjo (USA), Kei Miller (Jamaica / UK), Grace Nichols (Guyana / UK), Roger Robinson (Trinidad / UK), Tanya Shirley (Jamaica), and Dorothea Smartt (Barbados / UK). Translator of academic essays (literary studies, visual culture, history, political studies), theatre plays, and films.
Katja Zakrajšek holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Ljubljana. She is a literary translator working from English, French and Portuguese into Slovenian. Believing in decolonising and diversifying literary canons, she prefers to focus on literary traditions and spaces underrepresented in translation, in particular African and Afro-Diasporic writing. She is the recipient of several translation awards, including the Sovre award for best literary translation into Slovenian for Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other in 2022.
Ester Gendusa holds an MA from Birkbeck College and a PhD from the University of Palermo (Italy), where she is currently a research fellow in English language and translation. The author of Asimmetrie di genere e di razza in The Grass is Singing di Doris Lessing (2011) and of the first Italian monograph on Bernardine Evaristo’s literary production, Identità nere e cultura europea (2014), she has published extensively on post-colonial and (Black) British authors. Her most recent research interests reside in the interplay between language and power in contemporary multimodal discursive arenas (including news media) and in the representation of antinormative identities in British and American films.

CBCP x OIW Webinar: Publishing Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations
2025-12-11 17:00 - 18:30
CBCP x OIW webinar ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is a webinar series co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.
On Thursday 11th December at 5pm (UK time) we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project on Publishing Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations.
How do children’s books cross borders in wartime and what happens to them when they do? This joint talk traces the translational lives of war-related titles from commissioning to circulation, and the challenges the publishers meet along the way. Birgitte Beck Pristed introduces the Aarhus University project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War,” examining how Ukrainian and Russian children’s publishers operate under wartime conditions and how the books reflect child readers’ experiences of war and dislocation. In this talk, she focuses on the publishers’ hurdles of bringing books across borders. Drawing on new interviews with Ukrainian publishers, Nadia Pavlyk examines how international support and solidarity are negotiated in practice, and how these transnational networks shape the capacity to produce, translate, and present war-themed children’s literature under fire. Finally, Ekaterina Shatalova shows how, in Russia’s “hybrid” censorship environment, translated children’s books become politically charged objects: the same titles can function as cultural solidarity while being securitised as “threats.” Together, the speakers argue that translation is double-edged – both a vehicle of ethical resistance and a liability within contested information regimes.

To join via MS Teams, please register here.
Speakers:
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is PI of the 2024-2027 research project ‘PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine war,’ https://projects.au.dk/publish.
Nadiia Pavlyk is a researcher on the projects “PUBLISH: Children’s literature in Russia-Ukraine War” (Aarhus University, Denmark) and MSCA4Ukraine “DaR:UA. Dialogues and Reading. Shared Reading for Ukrainian Young People” (2025-2027), https://projects.au.dk/darua. She is a professor at Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University (Ukraine) and a member of the Pool of European Youth Researchers (PEYR). Her main research areas focus on youth policy, youth work, and non-formal education.
Ekaterina Shatalova is a prolific translator of children’s books and TV shows. She holds a Master’s degree in Victorian Literature from the University of Oxford and an Erasmus Mundus International Master’s degree in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture from the University of Glasgow, University of Tilburg, and Aarhus University (2022). She is currently a PhD fellow at Aarhus University as part of the joint project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War.”
