The Bookblast 10×10 Tour – The End of the World? The Balkans write the Holocaust

Thursday 27 September • Waterstones, Nottingham • 6.30 p.m.

Chair: Susan Curtis, translator & founding director, Istros Books (books from the Balkans). Founded in 2011 to showcase the very best fiction and nonfiction from the Balkan region to an audience of English speakers.

Book focus: Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić, (September 2018) trs. S.D. Curtis & Celia Hawkesworth, (October 2018), consists of two stories that skillfully revisit the question of “doubles”, and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society.

Christina Pribićević-Zorić was educated at Boston University and the Sorbonne. She worked for 20 years as a broadcaster at the English Language Service, Radio Belgrade, the BBC in London, and for The Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. She has translated over 35 translated works of fiction and non-fiction from Bosnian/Croatian/ Montenegrin/Serbian and French into English.

Book focus: The House of Remembering and Forgetting, (2017), by Filip David, is the story of a father who makes a hole in the floor of a train destined for a death camp. He pushes his two sons on to the tracks as a bid for freedom. “A profound book, immense in its wisdom and courage.” – The Los Angeles Review of Books

Georgia de Chamberet is currently translating The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez for Verso Books for publication in 2019. She will contribute to the discussion by looking at the anatomy of evil and ask if justice can be done when war criminals are brought to trial.