The Peacock

Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals - soon no one will know exactly what's going on. Selling 500,000 copies, Isabel Bogdan's book is a big hitter in Germany - and now it's coming home to roost.

Isabel Bogdan was born in Cologne and studied English and Japanese. She is an enthusiastic Hamburg-dweller, reader, writer and translator into German (including Jane Gardam, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nick Hornby, Jasper Fforde). Her first book Sachen machen came out in 2012, followed in 2016 by 'Der Pfau' ('The Peacock'), and in 2019 by Laufen. She has won prizes for her translating, her writing and the online interview project 'Was machen die da?'. Annie Rutherford champions poetry and translated literature in all its guises. She works as Programme Co-ordinator for StAnza, Scotland's international poetry festival, and as a writer and translator. Her published translations include German/Swiss poet Nora Gomringer's 'Hydra's Heads' (Burning Eye Books, 2018) and Belarusian poet Volha Hapeyeva's 'In My Garden of Mutants' (Arc, 2021). She co-founded the literary magazine Far Off Places and Göttingen's 'Poetree' festival.