Category Archives: Literature

We are delighted to share that Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic by Mathelinda Nabugodi has been shortlisted for the British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) First Book Prize 2026.

The shortlisting recognises an outstanding first monograph in Romantic Studies and places Nabugodi’s book among an impressive and highly competitive field. Published by UCL Press in 2023, Shelley with Benjamin offers a bold and innovative critical reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley through the philosophical lens of Walter Benjamin, reframing Romanticism as a dynamic, fragmentary mode of thought and interpretation.

This year’s judging panel received a large number of high‑quality nominations, making the selection process particularly challenging. The final shortlist reflects the breadth and vitality of current scholarship in Romantic Studies, and includes works published by major academic presses from the UK, Europe, and North America.

The 2026 shortlist is chaired by Professor Ross Wilson (University of Cambridge), with judges Dr Susan Civale (Canterbury Christ Church University), Professor Daisy Hay (University of Exeter), Dr Andrew McInnes (Edge Hill University), Dr Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman (University of Glasgow), Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan (The Byron Society), and Dr Amy Wilcockson (Queen Mary University of London).

The winner of the BARS First Book Prize will be announced at the BARS International Conference 2026, Romantic Retrospections, which will take place at the University of Birmingham from Wednesday 29 to Friday 31 July

We are delighted to share that Morning Star has reviewed Walter Benjamin’s Ark: a departure in biography by John Schad.

The reviewer draws attention to the book’s striking and unconventional approach to Benjamin’s life. Rather than following a traditional biographical path, the book traces the experiences of Benjamin’s son, Stefan, and uses this perspective to illuminate new dimensions of Benjamin’s story.

The review highlights the vivid and unsettling quality of the narrative. The chapters that follow Stefan’s journey aboard the Dunera are described as possessing the intensity of a magic realist novel. This captures something essential about the book: its willingness to blend archival insight with creative energy in order to reveal the emotional complexity surrounding Benjamin’s legacy.

It is great to see the book’s originality and emotional depth recognised. If you are interested in new approaches to life writing or want to discover a different perspective on Benjamin, this is a powerful place to start.

Read the review: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/walter-benjamin-not-you-know-him
Download the book free: https://uclpress.co.uk/book/walter-benjamins-ark/

July’s sunny weather wasn’t an excuse to relax at UCL Press – we’ve been busier than ever with five new open access books! Covering topics from historical memory and mental health to kinship, sensory heritage, and literary masculinity, these titles are, as always, freely available to download from our website.

An important addition to historical scholarship, Conversations with Third Reich Contemporaries: From Luke Hollands Final Account presents excerpts from filmed interviews conducted by British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland. Most interviewees were young adults when the war ended; some had benefited from Nazism. The book raises critical awareness of issues around representation, authenticity and the co-production of narratives. Download it free.

The ground-breaking Petty Tyranny and Soulless Discipline? Patients, policy and practice in public mental hospitals in England, 1918–1930 examines England’s public mental hospitals for the working class after the First World War. Narratives of patients’ difficult daily lives are interwoven with analysis of competing agendas from campaigners, government and new medical knowledge, to build a complex picture of mental health provision. Download free.

The fantastic Marriage Matters: Imagining love and belonging in Uganda engages with new and classic anthropological theory, and gender studies about kinship, marriage, relatedness and temporality. It examines how partnership, kinship, child filiation, friendship, ideas about love and commitment have been changing, and how Ugandans imagine past and future relationship between genders and generations. Download it free.

Presenting studies of historical environments through the lens of the senses, New Sensory Approaches to the Past: Applied methods in sensory heritage and archaeology showcases the latest approaches to sensory research through real-world scenarios of human−environment connections. Interdisciplinary examples of diverse sensory in-situ studies will enable readers to replicate and enhance their own investigations. Whether you’re a student, academic or researcher, it’s a fantastic read. Download it free.

Finally, the latest volume of the Comparative Literature and Culture series, Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel examines how the narratives of, J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa, offer a standpoint through which to address the inscription of heterosexual masculinity into Western literary legacy and the ways in which masculinity is re-fashioned in contemporary self-reflexive novels. Download it free.

We’ll be back again next month with a round up of the very best open access books. As always, stay safe!

UCL Press is delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Kathryn Batchelor as a series editor of the popular series Literature and Translation. Currently Professor in Translation Studies at UCL, she joins fellow editors Prof. Timothy Mathews and Dr. Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva.

The appointment comes as Prof. Geraldine Brodie steps down as co-series editor. We would like to thank Prof. Brodie for her hard work and dedication in growing the series.

Literature and Translation is a series for books of literary translation as well as about literary translation. Its emphasis is on diversity of genre, culture, period and approach. The series uses the UCL Press open access publishing model widely to disseminate developments in both the theory and practice of translation. Translations into English are welcomed of literature from around the world.

Fine out more about the series, and view published titles by visiting the series page.

Today marks the publication of a new book from UCL Press: Inclusion, Diversity and Innovation in Translation Education, edited by Dr Alejandro Bolaños García-Escribano and Dr Mazal Oaknín. We are delighted to celebrate this new publication by sharing an interview with Alejandro and Mazal, exploring their backgrounds in the field of translation education, their reflections on the process of editing an academic volume, and their thoughts about the future of academic publishing.

Tell us more about your background and experience in this field.

Alejandro: I have been involved in translation education since 2016 when I started training subtitlers at UCL Centre for Translation Studies. Since 2022, I have served as Associate Editor for The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, a leading scholarly journal on translation and interpreting education.

Mazal: Although I have been teaching Spanish language and literature since I graduated, my BA was in Translation. Pedagogical translation plays a key part in my teaching and research interests. I am also on the Editorial Board of Hikma: Translation Studies Journal

What do you enjoy most about your work?

Alejandro & Mazal: We have found many opportunities to collaborate and build a network within and beyond UCL. Our seminars and publications have opened up new research possibilities that have materialised in this book. Our activities have also nurtured a healthy work atmosphere, allowing us to exchange expertise and build a community of like-minded translation educators.

How do you work with authors and contributors to ensure their voices are heard and their work is presented in the best possible light?

Alejandro & Mazal: From the inception of this writing project, we have strived to include a diversity of voices from an array of backgrounds and areas of knowledge. We have worked closely with our contributors to ensure that the book aligns with our ethos on EDI approaches in education. Our work ethics enhances the human factor behind the production of an edited volume of this calibre. This is our trademark and something that we are extremely proud of.

How do you balance the need for academic rigour with the need to make your publications accessible and engaging to a broader audience?

Alejandro & Mazal: Since 2018, we have made efforts to disseminate our research through a series of free, hybrid seminars featuring renowned speakers and cutting-edge education-focused projects and proposals. Albeit scholarly rigorous and therefore appealing to lecturers and researchers alike, these seminars have also attracted much attention from students, language instructors and professionals. This is a testament to the accessible nature of our seminar series, on which this book has been based. In our book, we as editors as well as our contributors have followed this principle, ensuring that content is adequate for a wide readership.

What advice would you give to aspiring editors, and what do you think are the key skills and attributes required?

Alejandro & Mazal: Editors must never lose sight of the overarching themes and rationale of the book. At the same time, a good degree of flexibility is needed to accommodate new circumstances that might arise and thereby affect the workflow, structure or timeline of the writing process. In this respect, communication is always key, and editors need to be in regular touch with contributors and series editors, ensuring that there are no misunderstandings – everyone needs to always be on the same page at all times. For instance, we created ad-hoc documents including components such as rationale, structure, writing style guide, etc. Last but not least, it is easy to get dragged down by the possible challenges but remember to always enjoy the process and the promising opportunities it presents.

Surprise us with something unexpected you encountered in your work on this book.

Alejandro & Mazal: We are extremely pleased to have received the support of many colleagues from the outset. Among our long-term collaborators are UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education (CHE) and the Institute of Advances Studies (IAS), which have duly supported this initiative from its inception. We look forward to our book launch, generously sponsored by both CHE and IAS, on 11 November 2024. Looking back at our initial meeting with the series editors, we could not possibly imagine that so many renowned scholars and specialists would have endorsed the publication of this book. This has been a welcome confirmation of its relevance and timeliness.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing academic book publishing today, and how do you see the industry evolving in the future?

Alejandro & Mazal: There is a lot to unpack here! Despite its endless opportunities, artificial intelligence is undoubtedly disrupting the ways in which researchers obtain, analyse and discuss data as well as the writing process itself. In the face of ‘Publish or Perish’, scholars are under constant pressure to have their work published, which could potentially lead to malpractice in some cases.

In a more general sense, as Lecturers who work closely with students, we see the impact that social media has on our understanding of knowledge – for instance, the expectation of immediacy, the lack of nuance and the sweeping power of buzzwords appear to have replaced the need for in-depth research, reflection and discussion.

We believe that reflection and critical thinking cannot be rushed in academic publications, and to lead by example we have done our best to find the time and space that this volume has required in the past few years.

About the editors

Alejandro Bolaños García-Escribano (SFHEA, MCIL, CL) is Associate Professor in Audiovisual Translation at University College London.

Mazal Oaknín (FHEA) is Associate Professor (Teaching) and Language Coordinator of Spanish at University College London.

In today’s guest post, Maria Rubins talks about Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020, which resulted from an international research project uniting leading experts on Russian culture from British and American universities. 

The last hundred years have been marked by unprecedented migrations caused by world wars, revolutions, and economic globalization. Millions of people reside today outside their homelands, speak in adopted tongues and experience challenges and advantages provided by their status as “outsiders.” This specific anthropological experience generates hybrid identities that in turn inform art and fiction created by individuals who live at the crossroads between different cultures, languages and social codes.

Narratives of immigrant authors who, like Salman Rushdie or Assia Djebar, express themselves in the languages of their host countries, have long been discussed as a special category within diasporic and postcolonial contexts. But when we turn to the rich extraterritorial Russian literature produced over the last century in various parts around the globe, from Harbin to Paris, New York, Tel Aviv and São Paulo, we discover that the dominant critical reception has mainly focused on its connection to the homeland tradition. Russian émigré writing has been routinely discussed as a minor branch of Russian literature and its artistic lineage has been traced to the same set of canonical figures (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy etc.). Have Russian writers who lived abroad for decades remained somehow immune to diverse transnational flows, as opposed to their peers who originated in other countries? Is the Russian case different because most of émigré writers continued to use their mother tongue, such notable exceptions as Nabokov and Brodsky notwithstanding? And can the language be still considered a crucial factor in defining a writer’s national affiliation?

Together with a group of international experts, I set out to explore whether the hundred-year-old intellectual Russian diaspora has produced a mere clone of metropolitan literature, or an alternative cultural formation. We sought to identify distinct markers of diasporic Russian writing that go far beyond just thematic content, linguistic hybridity, a sense of alienation, nostalgia, or emphasis on the workings of memory. We examined how diasporic literature inscribes experiences that are not easily available within the metropolitan locus, giving us insight into the human condition from a perspective informed by a simultaneous awareness of at least two cultural dimensions. Contributions to the book Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora discuss characteristic ways in which diasporic texts and literary practices reframe Russian master narratives; question the dominant cultural canon; contest standard historical interpretations; reshape cultural memory; and reflect experiences of exile, deracination, migration, translingualism and multiple belonging. In particular, they engage with diaspora writers’ responses to foundational rhetorical or ideological parameters that have come to define Russian cultural politics. 

For instance, in Russia, writers were traditionally perceived as “prophets” and exerted tremendous authority. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were approached for guidance on various moral, religious and practical matters. In the 20^thcentury their works were reinterpreted as a prophecy of the Bolshevik rule: Lenin famously praised Leo Tolstoy “as a mirror of the Russian revolution” whereas Dostoevsky’s Demons was seen as a visionary novel about the chaos and violence of the social upheaval. Indeed, the status of a writer in Russia has always implied ethical responsibility.

How does the sense of mission change in the diaspora? What kind of prophecy can an exiled author deliver and to whom is it addressed? As Pamela Davidson’s chapter demonstrates, the tropes of prophecy and mission were radically reinterpreted in emigration. Many post-revolutionary intellectuals saw their mission as the rejection of Soviet Russia (for some this went as far as supporting Hitler as Stalin’s chief opponent). Others regarded emigres’ geographical dispersion across Europe as a prerequisite for a fulfilment of Russia’s providential calling to mediate between Eastern and Western Christianity. Yet, others, like Nabokov, resisted any mission at all.

If we turn to another cornerstone of collective Russian identity—the victory in the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is officially designated in Russia) and the tremendous suffering during the Siege of Leningrad,– we will see that diasporic and domestic writers interpret these events differently. Mark Lipovetsky’s analysis reveals that today’s liberal-minded authors living in Russia often show a cynical, a-historical attitude to the Siege as a reaction against the manipulation of this lingering trauma by the state propaganda. By contrast, diasporic writers tend to distance themselves from the present debates, to approach the Siege through historical documents, and to minimize the internal conflicts in their representations of life in Leningrad. 

Another sensitive topic, the Holocaust, was a de facto taboo in official Soviet discourse that deflated the specifically Jewish tragedy and focused on the common sacrifice of the Soviet people in the war against Nazi Germany. Diaspora naturally offered a space for reflection on this subject. It became one of the central topics in the writing of Russian Israelis and their interpretation has been coloured by the memory of Soviet antisemitism and silencing of the Holocaust and by local Israeli narratives of the shoah.

Many other key elements of the metropolitan canon have been likewise dramatically renegotiated in the diaspora. These complex processes of critical rethinking of the national tradition complemented by Russian writers’ engagement with political, ideological and cultural trends in their host countries eventually produced new forms of Russian cultural identities and alternative definitions of Russianness.  By articulating a new interpretive optic of this rich legacy our book aims to highlight the generative potential of diasporic difference. In this way, we believe, the metropolitan and diasporic literatures can engage in a productive dialogue and offer a more balanced view of Russia’s past and future cultural trajectories.

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About the author

Maria Rubins is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. A Russian translation is available with НЛО, under the title Век диаспоры: Траектории русской зарубежной литературы.

This post originally appeared on the UCL European Institute blog,