Biography
RAY KEENOY edited the Babel Guides series to fiction in translation and ran Boulevard Books. He has contributed to Jewish Renaissance, Routledge Kegan Paul’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers and The Sandspout, and other magazines; also The Guardian. He currently works as a translator, and runs the Sibaris centre for the free exchange of ideas and culture in Sansepolcro, Tuscany.
In eight brief but densely written “auto-fictions” veteran literary critic RAY KEENOY (founder of the Babel Guides to Fiction in Translation) sings of the British adventure in Europe. Pieces set in Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece, the East End and Hungary are like love letters pasted onto the wall of European history. Along with the familiar northern attraction to the sensuality and sunshine of the Mediterranean world his unusual (mixed Irish and Jewish) immigrant background has pushed him to question rather than romantically overlook the history of Europe’s seething populations and the struggles that have created a ruin in Ireland or an impoverished village in Spain. Accompanying the auto-fictions are startling minimal-media graphics of Romanian artist Daniel Balanescu.
