Description
Sitting by her window with a glass of cranberries in sugar syrup bought from a woman in the market who assured her they came from Karelia, she muses “Perhaps they have some other kind of effect when you eat them. Spiritual maybe? So I eat and wait for the Karelian cranberries to work their magic on me.” Skarynkina is impelled to spend the last of her money on a trip to Krakow to meet Czeslaw Milosz but never finds his address, so he remains to her an idol like Elvis Presley dressed in gold lame. Each story has a charm and imaginative flight of its own.
Review
‘She writes as if penning a letter to a close friend, loosely, intimately, but never less engagingly…’
— Alan Taylor ― The Herald
Country Life wrote of Skarynkina’s essays that they ‘exist at the very edge of what we can imagine.’
― Country Life
About the Author
Tania Skarynkina was born in 1969 in Smarhon, Belarus. She worked as a postwoman, journalist, and illustrator. She writes poetry in Russian and essays in Belarusian. Her works have been translated into English, Polish, Czech and Hebrew. Her collection of stories, A Large Czeslaw Milosz with a Dash of Elvis Presley, which was awarded the English PEN Award in 2018.
Jim Dingley is a respected translator and expert in European languages and studies, with associations with Imperial College London and University College London. He has a lifetime’s worth of experience translating Belarusian into English.