Best European Fiction 2013 (50 page)

SYLWIA CHUTNIK
was born in 1979 in Warsaw. She graduated with a degree in Culture and Gender Studies from Warsaw University, and is currently a social worker and the President of the MaMa Foundation, which promotes the rights of mothers in Poland. She is also a member of the feminist group Porozumienie Kobiet 8 Marca, and she works as a Warsaw city tour guide. She is the author of
Kieszonkowy Atlas Kobiet
(The Pocket Atlas of Women, 2008), a book that was nominated Book of the Year by the Polish Radio Programme Three, awarded the Polityka Passport Prize in literature, and longlisted for the Nike Literary Prize in 2009.

VITALIE CIOBANU
was born in 1964 in Floresti, Moldova. He is a novelist, essayist, literary critic, and president of Moldova PEN Centre. He is editor-in-chief of
Contrafort
literary magazine, contributes articles to numerous cultural and political magazines in Moldova and Romania, and works as an analyst for the Chisinau bureau of Radio Free Europe. He received the Union of Romanian Writers Essay Prize in 1999. His short stories have been translated into English, German, and Spanish.

BERNARD COMMENT
born in Switzerland, lives and works in Paris, where he directs the prestigious Fiction & Cie imprint at Éditions du Seuil. He is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collection
Tout passe
(Everything Passes), which received the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 2011.

ZEHRA ÇIRAK
was born in 1960 in Istanbul, Turkey. She moved to Germany with her family in 1962 and has lived in Berlin since 1982. Among other awards, she has won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (1989 and 2001) and the Hölderlin Prize (1994). She is the author of
Vogel auf dem Rücken eines Elefanten: Gedichte
(Bird on the Back of an Elephant, 1991);
Fremde Flügel auf eigener Schulter
(Stranger Wings on One’s Own Shoulder, 1994);
Leibesübungen
(Abdominal Exercises, 2000); and
Der Geruch von Glück
(The Scent of Happiness, 2011), among others.

KRISTIINA EHIN
was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She studied Comparative and Estonian Folklore at the University of Tartu, and in her native Estonian has to date published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories, and a retelling of South-Estonian fairy tales; she is also the author of two plays. She has won Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for
Kaitseala
(Protected Area, 2005), a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent as a nature-reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including, in English, six books of her poetry and three of prose, with her work making frequent appearances in English-language journals. She is a highly acclaimed performer of her own writing, and travels extensively around Estonia and abroad to perform her work, sometimes accompanied by musicians.

GYRÐIR ELÍASSON
was born in Reykjavik in 1961, but spent most of his childhood in Sauðárkrókur in northwest Iceland. He is a poet, fiction writer, and translator: his first poetry collection was published in 1983, and since then he has published poetry collections, novels, and collections of short stories—the latter including 2003’s
Steintré
(The Stone Tree), which was published in English translation in 2008. Elíasson is also a diligent translator, mainly from English, and has translated works by William Saroyan and Richard Brautigan. He has been labelled “the great stylist” in Icelandic contemporary literature, and won the Icelandic Literary Prize as well as the Halldor Laxness Prize for Literature in 2000 for his short-story collection
Gula húsið
(The Yellow House). He was nominated twice for the Nordic Council Literature Prize before he won the prize in 2011. He currently lives in Reykjavík with his wife and three children.

PAUL EMOND
was born in Brussels in 1944. After obtaining a degree and a doctorate of letters at the University of Louvain (with a thesis on the novels of Jean Cayrol), he spent three years in Czechoslovakia and wrote his first novel,
La danse du fumiste
(The Dance of a Sham, 1979). Returning to Belgium, he published other novels and worked for the Archives et usées de la littérature in Brussels, eventually becoming a professor at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion, in the Graduate School for Theater and Film, where he teaches now. An accomplished dramatist as well as fiction writer, Emond’s first play debuted in 1986, with more than fifteen to follow, these being performed in numerous countries, including France, Quebec, the United States, England, Romania, and Bulgaria.

RAY FRENCH
was born in Wales. His first book was
The Red Jag & other stories
(Planet, 2000). His novel
All This Is Mine
(2003) was translated into Italian and Dutch, and he was a co-author of
Four Fathers
(2006) a collection of stories about fatherhood, which was translated into Spanish. His second novel
Going Under
(2007) is about a middle-aged man who, faced with redundancy, buries himself alive in his back garden and refuses to come up until everyone’s job is saved. The
Sunday Times
said, “Given that our hero spends most of its three hundred pages in a box, the pace and plotting of this novel are remarkable … ” It was translated into French and German, and adapted for German radio. His forthcoming novel
Welcome To The Reservation
, is about a Native American who arrives in a desolate ex-mining town in the Welsh Valleys, pledging to save an ancient yew from being chopped down to make way for a supermarket. He teaches at the University of Hull.

CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT
, born 1962, has been called “one of Denmark’s finest prose writers” by the major daily
Information
. After early work in poetry and experimental prose, she has published eight novels, one collection of short stories, and three volumes of linked stories:
Camilla and the Horse
(2008);
Camilla—og resten af selskabet (
Camilla—and the Rest of the Party, 2010); and
Selskabet gør op
(The Party Breaks Up
,
2012). Various of her books have been published in Norwegian, Swedish, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Arabic.

KIRILL KOBRIN
was born in 1964 in Nizhny Novgorod (then Gorky), Russia. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, co-edits the Moscow magazine of sociology, history, and politics
Neprikosnovennij Zapas
(Emergency Rations), and conducts research into the cultural history of Russia and the Czech Republic. Kobrin is the author of twelve books, of which the latest is a tribute to Flann O’Brien entitled
Tekstoobrabotka
(Bookhandling). He has been hailed by critics as the “Russian Borges” and is considered one of the founders of Russian psychogeography. His work has been translated into several European languages. Kobrin lives in Prague.

ŽARKO KUJUNDŽISKI
was born in 1980 in Skopje, Macedonia. His first novel
Spectator
, was published in 2003 and went through five editions. His later works include (in Macedonian):
Andrew, Love, and Other Disasters
(2004),
America
(2006),
Found and Lost
(2008), and a collection of short stories,
13
(2010). He has also published award-winning short stories and essays, several of which have been translated. In 2009 he received his MA in World and Comparative Literature from Sts. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. He is editor-in-chief at the Antolog publishing house and e-zine
Reper
(reper.net.mk). He also writes weekly columns for the daily newspaper
Dnevnik
.

DAN LUNGU
was born in 1969 in Botoani, Romania. A sociologist by training, he is one of Romania’s leading authors today. To date, he has written four novels, two volumes of short stories, and he has edited several collections. His books have been translated into ten languages, and his novel
Sînt o baba comunista!
(I’m a Communist Old Hag!, 2007) is currently being made into a film. He has founded the literary group Club 8, playing an important part in the literary life of postcommunist Romania. He has been nominated for the Jean Monnet European Literature Prize and received many other literary prizes.

TOMÁS MAC SÍOMÓIN
was born in Dublin in 1938. He received his doctorate in biology from Cornell University and has worked as a biological researcher and university lecturer in the USA and Ireland, as well as a journalist, editor of the newspaper
Anois
, translator (from Catalan), and editor of the literary and current affairs journal
Comhar
. His collection of short stories,
Cinn Lae Seangáin
(The Diary of an Ant, 2005) won the award for best short story collection in the Oireachtas competition in 2005, and his novel
An Tionscadal
(The Project, 2007) won the main Oireachtas award in 2007. His most recent novel is the futuristic science fiction
An bhfuil Stacey ag iompar?
(2011).His work has been translated into many languages, most recently into Slovenian, Romanian, and Catalan. He now lives and works in Catalonia, Spain.

TANIA MALYARCHUK
was born in 1983 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, and is considered one of Ukraine’s most talented young prose writers. Her first novel,
Adolpho’s Endspiel,
or a Rose for Liza, appeared in 2004. Her later collections of short fiction include
From Above Looking Down: A Book of Fears
(2006),
How I Became a Saint
(2006),
To Speak
(2007), and
Bestiary of Words
(2009). She is the only Ukrainian writer under thirty to have had her collected works published in a single volume (as
The Divine Comedy
, in 2009). In 2012 she published her second novel
The Biography of a Chance Miracle.
She splits her time between Vienna and Ivano-Frankivsk.

MIKE MCCORMACK
was born in London in 1965 and grew up in Ireland. His first collection of short stories,
Getting it in the Head
(1996), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1996 and was New York Times Book of the Year in 1998. He co-wrote the screenplay for an award-winning short film adaption of one of the stories in the collection, “The Terms.” He has also published two novels,
Crowe's Requiem
(1998) and
Notes from a Coma
(2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. He is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Ireland in Galway and teaches fiction writing for the MA program there.

SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIĆ
was born in 1960 in Kiseljak, Bosnia. He is a writer, filmmaker, and editor, and is the author of five books, two of which—the poetry collection
Nine Alexandrias
(2003) and the acclaimed novel
Sarajevo Blues
(2001)—are available in English translation. When the war in Bosnia began in 1992, he and his family remained as “internally displaced” persons in besieged Sarajevo. Together with friends, he started a new magazine
Dani
(Days), in an effort to support the spirit of democratic rule and pluralism during what soon became a systematic genocide against his compatriots. The magazine remains Bosnia’s leading news and cultural venue. His articles, poems, and essays have been translated and published in leading European and American newspapers and magazines, including
The Village Voice, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Der Spiegel
, and others. He and his family arrived in the US in 1996 as political refugees and currently live in Alexandria, Virginia.

LYDIA MISCHKULNIG
lives in Vienna, Austria. She has won numerous prizes, including the Bertelsmann Literature prize, the Elias Canetti Award, the Austrian Literary Scholarship, and the Joseph Roth Award. Her publications in German include
Umarmung
(Embrace, 2002),
Hollywood im Winter
(Hollywood in Winter, 1996 and 2012),
Macht euch keine Sorgen
(Don’t Worry, 2009), and
Schwestern der Angst
(Sisters of Fear, 2010). She maintains a website at www.lydiamischkulnig.net and publishes essays in Spectrum (
Die Presse
) and Album (
Der Standard
).

DRAGAN RADULOVIC
was born in Cetinje, Montenegro, in 1969. He published his first collection of short stories,
Petrifikacija
(Petrification) in 2001 and his first novel
Auschwitz Café
, in 2003. He also published two collections of short pieces,
Vitezovi ništavila
(Knights of Nothingness, 2005), and
Splav Meduze
(The Raft of the Medusa, 2007). Dragan Radulović currently lives in Budva, where he teaches philosophy at the Danilo Kiš Secondary School and writes essays and literary reviews for Montenegrin periodicals.

TIINA RAEVAARA
was born in 1979 in Kerava, Finland. In 2005 she received her doctorate in genetics from the University of Helsinki. Her first novel,
Eräänä päivänä tyhjä taivas
(One Day, an Empty Sky) was published in 2008. Her first collection of short stories,
En tunne sinua vierelläni
(I Don’t Feel You Beside Me, 2010) won the prestigious Runeberg prize. Her most recently work is a scientific exploration of the relationship between dogs and humans
Koiraksi ihmisille
(About Dogs and Humans, 2011). Her fiction, which draws on elements of science fiction, fantasy, and surrealism, stands apart from the largely realistic mainstream of contemporary Finnish literature.