Mikhail Shishkin is considered to be one of the most outstanding Russian writers today. A winner of all major literary awards in Russia, he nonetheless remains surprisingly unknown to many readers both in Russia and abroad. With five novels and two short-stories produced in the past twenty years, his books have now been translated into…
| 24/05/2014
I first saw the bullet holes in 1978, when I was 15 years old. They were dotted around the wall, at knee height, just inside the main entrance of 59, Népszinház Street, a large three-storey block of flats in Budapest’s poorer Eighth District. This was where my father had lived as a child. He and…
| 24/05/2014
Today Marina Lewycka is a world class writer. With her first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) selling over a million copies in the UK alone, it has now been translated into over 30 languages. Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature, Lewycka’s witty tragicomic style was a…
| 29/04/2014
On gazing at a ward full of young children born with horrific defects due to fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, Grigory Brovkin is preoccupied with the “beauty and ugliness resting within the single body of a diseased infant. The two faces of nature brought into stark relief.” Such contrasts are manifold in the story of Grigory; we…
| 29/04/2014