This story starts roughly in the 1970s, a few years after I was born, about the time when I began to have memories and my fathers codename was already long established as Andronic, a name we learned about only last summer . . .
Burying the Typewriter is the haunting true story of life behind the Iron Curtain, and one teenage girls flight from the Romanian secret police and the Ceausescu regime.
At 2 a.m. on 10 March 1983, Carmen Bugans father left the family home, alone. That afternoon, Carmen returned from school to find officers of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, in her living room. Her father had been detained for his protests against the Communist regime in Romania, and the family home was now laced with surveillance devices. Overnight, Carmens life became a living hell of paranoia and small-scale resistance, her schoolteachers and the friends and neighbours all around her transformed into potential informants.
Burying the Typewriter is the extraordinary story of Carmens coming of age in the twilight years of Ceausescus rule. Above all, it is a luminous, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest book about the price of courage, the pain of exile, and the power of memory.
Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.
Arvustused
Startling warmth Telegraph Touched with grace Independent A modern classic Sunday Times Imagine a Romanian Stasiland written by a poet . . . A song of childhood that actually seems to be warm-blooded in your hands William Fiennes One of the most telling insights I've read about life under communism. Warm and humane Observer The Securitate could not take Bugans memories, her compassionate heart or her clear writers eye . . . Startling warmth, perception and humanity Daily Telegraph
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Short-listed for The Orwell Prize 2013 (UK).
Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is an award-winning author of ten books that include memoir, essays, and criticism. Her work has been translated into several languages, gathered international praise, and been widely anthologized. Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems won a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and her book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, was named an essential book for writers by Poets and Writers magazine. She wrote a highly praised monograph, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Her most recent collections of poems are Time Being and Tristia. Carmen's memoir, Burying the Typewriter, won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and has been featured on NPR, ABC, PRI and the BBC. Carmen was educated at the University of Michigan (BA), Lancaster University, UK (MFA), and Oxford University, UK (DPhil). She received fellowships from Wolfson College Oxford, Arts Council England, and the Hawthornden Retreat for Writers.
