Biography
Xavier Queipo holds degrees in biology and medicine and surgery. Since 1989, he has lived and worked in Brussels, Belgium. He has published numerous works of fiction, among them Arctic and Other Seas (1990), The Northwest Passage (1996), Kite (2001), Dragoness (2007) and Extramunde (2011), and has been awarded many prizes, including the García Barros and Xerais Prizes for best novel. Several of his works have been translated into French, Portuguese and Spanish. Aside from writing poetry, essays and children’s literature, he is also a renowned translator into Galician from English and French, his co-translation of Ulysses by James Joyce garnering universal acclaim, and has collaborated with artists and musicians in Galicia and Brussels.
Synopsis
The novel Kite (200 pages) was inspired by the case of Giovanni Pontiero, the English translator of José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira or Blindness. The translator himself started to go blind as he was translating Saramago’s novel and later died of his illness. This is the inspiration for Queipo’s novel, though the characters and events in the novel are not directly connected with Saramago or Pontiero.
Sample
They had met in the cinema. In one of those enormous auditoriums you hardly ever see any more. It was a screening of Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s poignant parable based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. During the scene when the helicopters advance on the Viet Cong to the rhythm of Wagner, the auditorium filled with light from the napalm explosions. That was the first time they saw one another, when the shadows gave way to light. That was when she said, naturally, sincerely, with the cool assurance of a woman who knows she is a builder of dreams:
‘Let me hold your hand. I feel kind of shaky.’
‘Sure. Don’t worry. I’ll be here till the end of the film,’ Francis replied with a rush of confidence.
Portico of Galician Literature 