Trip to a Book: The Fire Starters (Los incendiarios)
A conversation between Northern Irish writer Jan Carson and her Spanish translator Clara Ministral about the book “The Fire Starters” (“Los Incendiarios”) and its translation into Spanish.
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast. Her debut novel Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, were published by Liberties Press, Dublin. A micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories was published by the Emma Press in 2017 and a second volume appeared in July 2020. Jan’s novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019 and subsequently won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. It is currently shortlisted for the Blackwell’s Books Kitschies Prize for speculative fiction. Jan has also been shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize 2020, the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize and, in 2016, won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in journals such as Banshee, The Tangerine, Winter Papers and Harper’s Bazaar, and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. In 2018 Jan was the Irish Writers Centre’s inaugural Roaming Writer in Residence on the trains of Ireland. She was the 2019 recipient of the Jack Harte Bursary. Jan has curated the CS Lewis Festival, the Hillsborough Festival of Literature and Ideas and the inaugural Belfast Lit Crawl.
Clara Ministral has been translating fiction and non-fiction from English to Spanish for just over a decade. She has translated around twenty books, including works by Rebecca Solnit, Sherman Alexie, John Haines, Rebecca Miller and Colin Bateman. During that time she has also held other positions in the arts sector both in the UK and in Spain, primarily in publishing and bookselling. Her latest translation to come out is Los incendiarios (Hoja de lata, 2020) (The Fire Starters), by Northern Irish author Jan Carson.