The author of C and Satin Island talks to Deborah Levy about The Threshold and the Ledger, his exploration of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann published by Notting Hill Editions.
Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.
Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Tom McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.
Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, alongside a critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. Her latest collection of stories, The Position of Spoons, was published in 2024. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and she won the Prix Femina Etranger.
The event will be followed by an audience Q&A and a book signing.
Image Credit: McCarthy by Nicole Strasser
