I’ve had some good news. Arts Council England have awarded me a Developing Your Creative Practice Grant for a project called ‘How Stories Travel’ that will allow me to take my literary exploring to new horizons.
The plan is to work with wonderful podcast producer and writer Stephanie Tam to develop a new show exploring how different characters, themes and ideas travel around the world. For our pilot episode, we’re planning to look at the figure of Dracula.
I first got interested in this when I heard from literary historian Professor Francesca Orsini about Kottayam Pushpanath, who translated Bram Stoker’s Dracula into the Indian language of Malayalam in the mid-twentieth century. He became so fascinated by the character during this process that he wrote his own series of Dracula novels in Malayalam, following the vampire count around India and beyond.
The novels remain out of reach to English speakers, although they have sold millions of copies in their original language. When I was writing Relearning to Read, I got to have a look at an extract of Dracula Asiayil (Dracula in Asia), translated specially for me by Suneetha Balakrishnan with the kind permission of Rayan Pushpanath, Kottayam’s grandson. He has founded a publishing house to bring his grandfather’s cult hits to new generations of readers.
Thinking about Dracula stalking the tea plantations of India and channelling the evils of British colonialism, as he does in the extract I read, got me interested in what it is that makes certain characters travel and shapeshift between cultures and languages. After all, the vampire count came into Stoker’s imagination from elsewhere in the first place, drawing on the figure of Vlad the Impaler and various Eastern European vampire legends.
So I decided to investigate and I’m hoping you can help me, much as so many of you did when I first set out to read the world fifteen years ago. I want to track the character of Dracula around the globe. I’d love to hear of unusual sightings of the vampire count in literature, artworks, films and places in other cultures and language worlds.
Perhaps there’s an unusual statue of Dracula in your town. Maybe you’ve recently encountered him in manga or romantasy. Or heard him set to music. It could be that you’re even writing a spin-off yourself.
Whatever it is, I’d love to hear about it – the more unusual the better. Just leave a comment below or email ann[at]annmorgan.me with Dracula in the subject line. Who knows, if it’s intriguing enough, I might even come to see for myself!
Picture: ‘Dracula‘ by maniak713 on flickr.com