Who Was Eliza May Drayden?

Translator David McKay returns to the show fifteen months after his last visit when we discussed Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier, which would go on to win the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize. McKay’s latest collaboration with Daanje is another monumental novel, The Song of Stork and Dromedary, out now from FSG. In Daanje’s home country the Netherlands this novel did something no book had done before, winning both of the country’s two major literary prizes in the same year.

Eleven chapters spanning 1788 to 2030. At the center is Eliza May Drayden, a parson’s daughter in a Yorkshire village who publishes one strange, badly received novel the same year her sister Millicent publishes a wildly successful one. Readers will recognize Daanje’s sisters as modeled after the Brontës, and very early in the novel, like Emily Brontë, Eliza May dies young. What follows are stories of other women through decades and centuries reaching for this writer they can’t manage to recover, stymied by contradictory biographies, a notebook nobody can decipher, and an empty grave. Sisterhood is a strong theme in the novel, and recurring motifs punctuate the linkages among the various narratives.

Lori and David get into the altered Emily Brontë poems that open each chapter, how the novel is structured more like a long piece of classical music than a conventional narrative, and David’s work translating the text. David also reads a passage from the book. It’s a remarkable novel, and David, as always, is an engaging discussion partner.

Watch above, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

And please check-out David’s series of readings from the novel here: https://www.youtube.com/@the song of stork and dromedary