Story Of The Month
June 20th - Literary Evening
Join us in a discussion to mark the book launches of two new works in English by these accomplished authors. Engagement is a hard-hitting yet achingly humane novella by Turkish/Dutch author and journalist, Çiler Ilhan, based on a true story of blood feud. Lidija Dimkovska’s Grandma Non-Oui, brings us a tale of politics and migratioon from this Macedonian/Slovenian author who has already made an international reputation for herself as a poet. With both these authors in the UK for the promotion of their new works, we will take the opportunity to talk about writing away from home, female narratives, and the picking apart of internal and external borders that each author has undertaken in in very different ways.
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European Writers Festival at the British Library
18-19 May 2024
With special guest Andrey Kurkov, 30 authors and poets, each from one European region or country, will gather together at the British Library for a weekend of panels and performances.
Our authors Andrea Tompa and Ioana Pârvulescu will be taking part in this 2024 Festival – a unique opportunity to enjoy some of the best European prose and poetry in English translation over one star-studded weekend. See the full programme here.
Organised by the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC) London in partnership with the European Literature Network and the British Library, and with the support of the Delegation of the European Union to the United Kingdom and the European Parliament Liaison Office in the United Kingdom, the European Writers’ Festival is once again curated by former BBC journalist Rosie Goldsmith, director of the European Literature Network.
A Journey through Myth - book launch
Barbican Library, Barbican Centre Level 2 Silk Street London EC2Y 8DS
Thursday , 16th May at 6:30pm
Jonah and His Daughter is the Romanian author Ioana Pârvulescu‘s latest book to be published in English. It offers us an affectionate and vivid account of the reluctant, recalcitrant prophet Jonah, passed down from mother to daughter over the course of thousands of years, from the eighth century B.C. to the present day. In a sweeping narrative that pans out from the ancient port of Jaffa in the eastern Mediterranean to the modern-day cities of Prague, Munich, London and Bucharest, the first storyteller we meet is Jonah’s daughter herself, and the last is a proud mother of twins in our own time. A colourful, variegated tapestry of tales within tales that inter- weaves myth, legend, family histories, and psychologies, the novel expands upon a familiar Biblical story in order to meditate on permanence and change, on the unfolding of self through storytelling, and the irreducible mystery of the narrated self.
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