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Scotsman
3 days ago
- Politics
- Scotsman
Andrey Kurkov Edinburgh Book Festival
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Ordinary vexations get a lot more vexatious when your country is at war. Take, for example, an airline losing your luggage, which happened to Andrey Kurkov the day before our conversation. With civilian air travel grounded in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, retrieving his bags meant a 1000-kilometre round trip by road to an airport in Poland. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad As the Ukrainian writer who is best known around the world, and a fluent English speaker, Kurkov, 64, has become a kind of ambassador for his country, a ubiquitous giver of lectures, organiser of fundraisers and writer of articles for foreign press. He is also generous with his time in interviews with people like me. 'I was already, for many years, an explainer of Ukraine,' he says, mildly, speaking on Zoom from his Kyiv apartment. 'I would be invited to different festivals to talk about my books, but in the end I would talk about Ukraine and my books.' Andrey Kurkov | Orenda Books As with so many things in Ukraine, Kurkov's career divides into two parts: before the war began, and after. 'Before', he was a writer of highly acclaimed crime novels set in Ukraine, books with a sardonic edge and dash of the surreal. His best known is Death and the Penguin, published in English in 2001. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'After' has turned him from novelist to statesman, commentator, public intellectual. When Russia invaded, he stopped writing fiction and turned to non-fiction, writing for newspapers and websites around the world. He has published two collections of non-fiction writing: Diary of an Invasion and, most recently, Our Daily War. As the war grinds on, it feels more important than ever to share the day-to-day experiences of ordinary Ukrainians. Kurkov's calm demeanour, precise observation and wry sense of humour make him ideally suited to the task. His two-day journey to collect his luggage meant he missed a heavy night of shelling in Kyiv. 'It was very bad. There was an explosion not far away from my daughter's home in the centre, 100 metres away, a high-rise was damaged, the windows were out.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This is daily life now for many Ukrainians: checking air raid siren apps; reckoning up the previous night's damage; checking in regularly with family and friends. On nights of intensive bombardment, no one gets much sleep. Kurkov says he has lost his sense of humour only twice in his life: at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, in February 2022, and in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea. The day after being woken at 5am by the sound of explosions, he and his wife, who is British, left the city for Uzhgorod near the western border, partly to make it easier for Kurkov to travel. 'When we were in the car, I was driving and speaking on the phone to journalists. Then, when we reached Uzhgorod, I was asked by several newspapers to write articles to explain the reasons for the war. It happened automatically, naturally. I just started writing, sometimes four or five big articles every week. I forgot about fiction at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.' When the Kurkovs returned to Kyiv in July, morale in the city was high. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'When the Ukrainian army pushed the Russian army from Kyiv region, there was euphoria and everyone was sure that things were coming to an end,' he says. Did he think that? 'I didn't, I was sure that Russia will not stop the war until the death of Putin. Putin will not stop the war because this is his last war, and he started it in order to be remembered in Russian history as somebody who made Russia great again. But I was sure that we would have enough military help from the West to liberate the occupied territories and to keep Russia at bay.' When this did not happen, and the war in the east of the country became entrenched, Kyiv stared to return to a strange kind of normality. Shops and cafes reopened; the alcohol ban was revoked; people began to distinguish between the sound of a drone and a ballistic missile; danger became part of everyday life. 'Your behaviour adapts to the war, you know,' Kurkov said. 'You think perhaps I can go and have coffee, and if there is a siren I will move away from the windows in the cafe.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Cultural activities resumed too, and were embraced with a new passion. Kyiv hosts a book festival in June, and Kharkiv's is at the end of August. Ukraine's second city, 30km from the frontlines, is under constant bombardment, so all the events will take place in bomb shelters and underground spaces. Meanwhile, the theatres in Kyiv are full. In Odessa, when the shelling allows, people are going to the opera and drinking champagne. In this war, culture is a contested area. 'People understand that culture is actually the source of energy and the source of hope, because culture is part of national identity. This is a war against Ukrainian national identity, because this is the identity that forces Ukrainians to defend their land.' Writers have long been revered in Eastern Europe. Being a literary figure tends to be synonymous with speaking for your country, politically and philosophically. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Writers were punished by the regimes, they were killed, they were exiled. The nation remembers them, and they become symbols, they become heroes. For Ukrainians, there are no military figures who are considered as important as poets.' The country is also reckoning its losses, at least in part, by the loss of its writers. 120 Ukrainian writers, poets and publishers have been killed since the war began. When I ask Kurkov if he worries about his own life, he says simply 'No, I don't think about my own life, because if I worry I cannot function.' The mood in Kyiv, he says, is stoic. Humour has become blacker, his own included. People drink more coffee to cope with the sleepless nights. 'There is no depression. People are angry, bitter. They don't hide that they are afraid every night for their lives, they write about it on Facebook, but nobody is addressing Zelensky or anybody else publicly asking for peace at any cost. People joke that if you are not killed in the night then in the morning you have to go to work. I think the level of trauma, psychological trauma, is very high.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Returning to a kind of normality has also meant that, after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, Kurkov has returned to writing fiction again, finishing the third novel in his Kyiv Mysteries series, The Lost Soldiers (not yet available in English). The books are set in 1919, during the four-year period in which Ukraine declared its independence from Russia after the fall of the Tsars, provoking fierce retaliation by the Red Army. The first in the series, The Silver Bone, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. 'The thing for me is that writing fiction is a pleasure and you cannot expect pleasure in this time of the suffering in the country,' he says. 'There was something immoral in this desire. It was escapism. But I am irritated with myself if I can't write fiction. I think, if I go to the theatre - and I go to the theatre with great pleasure now, much more than I used to - then why not find time to write a story?' He says the parallels between 1919 and the present situation are self-evident. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It's the same situation. In 1919, the Red Army attacked Ukraine in order to turn Ukraine into a Russian province. And the level of violence today against the Ukrainian civilian population is the same as it was then.' But there is enough distance to write about it through the lens of imagination. 'I use my imagination and I use archives. It's a pleasure, it's very interesting, and I can add my fantasy and my imagination to the real events, which I cannot allow myself to do with today's reality. I would not even start a novel about today's situation.' I ask him if he's still optimistic? 'Well, I'm a pathological optimist. This is a medical state.' His eyes twinkle just a little. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'I'm still an optimist, but I would say 'cautious optimist mixed with realist'. I think everybody who remains in Ukraine now, even if they don't realise it, they are optimists.' Andrey Kurkov will talk about Our Daily War at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August at 5pm, and with Richard Lloyd Parry in a discussion on How to Resist, 18 August at 1.15pm
Daily Mail
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
From bloodsucking vampires to time travelling humanoids; the best Science Fiction out this month: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab, Kill Them with Kindness by Will Carver, Esperance by Adam Oyebanji
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is available now from the Mail Bookshop Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab (Tor £22, 544pp) Even as they take blood, vampires are the gift that still keep on giving to the genre of dark romance. Now V. E. Schwab's foray into this fertile world has borne ripe and juicy fruit. Her new book is imbued with love, lust and yearning – mostly of the sapphic variety – and her take on hidden desires, hunger and corruption puts it up there with the classics of the genre. From 16th-century Spain to 21st-century America via Venice and London, the plotlines are languorously long, yet strong as sinew and soused in buckets of gore. Three women, three lives and three living deaths – sink your teeth into it and drink deep. Kill Them with Kindness by Will Carver (Orenda Books £9.99, 300pp) It starts with a knockabout dystopian premise: suppose the leaders of the western world decided to consolidate their power by releasing a deadly virus? Then suppose that the immunologist behind it all went rogue and found a bug that made people nice. Overnight, carnivorous chefs would go vegan, tech bros develop a conscience and the world would be transformed by little acts of kindness. Suffice to say, no one would put up with that, either. Carver delights in grimly plausible overlaps with our recent history. It's clever, compelling, funny and it really makes you think: could it yet happen? Or did it happen already? Esperance is available now from the Mail Bookshop Esperance by Adam Oyebanji (Arcadia £10.99, 432pp) Not many books feature time-travelling humanoids that talk like actor George Raft at his most gangsterish. There's humour here and also good, solid plotting – key characteristics of this clever, intricate, hugely enjoyable story that still packs a real punch. People are being drowned with seawater – mysteriously and ruthlessly – in inner-city apartments and grand country mansions alike. After the murderers are a pair of straight-talking cops, a glamorous Amazonian Nigerian with mysterious tech and a charming Bristolian drifter. Linking them is the Esperance, a 19th-century British sailing ship, whose historical business is very much the point of it all and will keep you gripped and leave you furious.
Express Tribune
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Unedited with Awais Khan
Awais Khan is the award-winning author of four novels; In the Company of Strangers, No Honour, Someone Like Her and most recently In the Shadows of Love. Khan's writing is published by Simon & Schuster, Orenda Books and Hera Books and recently featured in Forbes. The author studied creative writing with Faber Academy in London and has been on the judging panel of prominent literary prizes and is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and Durham University. 1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your writing journey. I am the author of four critically acclaimed novels, namely: In the Company of Strangers, No Honour, Someone Like Her and In the Shadows of Love. I've spoken about this many times publicly, but my journey was a particularly difficult one. Things are hard enough for writers at the best of times, but when you're a writer based in Pakistan, just multiply those hardships by 100. It's just that Pakistan doesn't have a proper publishing industry despite having a population of 240 million. My life changed when I took a novel writing and editing course with Faber Academy. That was where I completed the first draft of what would later become In the Company of Strangers. Following that, I secured a literary agent (Annette Crossland) in 2017 and got my first publishing deal in 2018. I haven't looked back since. 2. In the Shadows of Love is your fourth novel. What's it about and does writing get any easier? If anything, writing gets harder and harder. There is much more at stake, and if there's one thing that's constant in this industry, it's imposter syndrome. You constantly feel like you don't belong. The self-doubt is crushing, but I also think it makes one a better writer. In the Shadows of Love is the sequel to my bestselling debut novel In the Company of Strangers. It takes readers back to the secretive lives of Lahore's elite. The much-loved protagonists, Mona and Bilal, return in this book. In the sequel, things have finally settled down for Mona with Bilal having embraced her love child with Ali. However, when she receives a message on day, the tranquil life she has carefully built threatens to come crashing down. 3. Out of all four, which book is your favourite? That's like asking someone to pick a favourite child! If I had to pick one, though, I would pick No Honour, mainly because I spent years writing it. This is the book that I've been closest to. 4. Your books touch on social issues that are plaguing Pakistan. Some people might argue that this tarnishes the image of Pakistan internationally. What would you say to that? To privileged people living in Pakistan, it may well seem as if my books are tarnishing the image of Pakistan internationally, but if you ever stop and ask the common Pakistani what they're going through, you'll realize that their reality is very different. Living in our respective bubbles in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, we are often completely ignorant to the problems plaguing the majority of people in this country, and when we do hear about them, we worry about how the western world would react. I think that as a writer, it is my responsibility to be the voice of the voiceless. I try to use whatever influence I have to shine a light on social issues in Pakistan. It would be inhumane not to. If people feel uncomfortable about it, that's their prerogative, but I will always try to speak out against the injustices faced by Pakistanis, come what may. If that makes people think I am tarnishing Pakistan's image internationally, then so be it. 5. Who is Awais Khan when he's not writing? Awais Khan is an avid reader when not writing. I love to read although these days I don't get enough time to do that. I have to do lots of boring 'day job' work to keep the engine running, but I also like to relax with a good TV series or movie. When I am in London, I am always busy in meetings or catching up with friends, so there's no time to watch or read anything, but in Lahore, I rarely go out socially, so that enables me to spend more time with my books and television. 6. What do you think of the publishing industry in Pakistan? What can be done to improve things for writers here? Frankly, I think the publishing industry here is in shambles. Apart from Oxford University Press, we don't have a single international publisher in this country of 240 million people. It is an absolute disgrace. The local publishers that do exist lack essential resources like good editors, proper marketing personnel and distribution systems, which means that their footprint is minimal. The fault, however, does not lie solely with the publishers. Most Pakistani readers, both here and abroad, do not support their authors. They would much rather buy an overpriced cup of coffee than a book by a Pakistani author. This is the sad reality, which may be a bit difficult to swallow for some people, but that doesn't make it any less true. Until and unless our readers go out en masse to buy our books, nothing will change in Pakistan. Instead of buying that coffee, try investing in a Pakistani author. If you don't want to support authors by buying their books, then give them exposure through social media and other avenues. We love to support cricket, so why not literature? Similarly, publishers here need to go back to the drawing board and see where they are faltering. They need to find investors, nurture their authors and draw up proper marketing and publicity plans. Publishing a book isn't merely printing it and attaching an ISBN number to it. It is so much more than that. 7. Why don't we get to see more Pakistani writers finding success internationally? The one thing we all have to realize is that publishing is a business. At the end of the day, if you don't sell, you will not get published. Like I said earlier, Pakistani authors don't see the same support as other writers do. Pakistani people in general don't buy books, and if they do buy them, they'd rather pick up pirated copies from Urdu bazaar. There are many lovely readers here that do buy originals and support their authors, but we need more. If we want to make a dent, we need many more people. The UK and US have a huge South Asian diaspora. There are enough Pakistanis out there to ensure that Pakistani authors easily make every single bestseller list out there. The more sales Pakistani authors have, the more they'll get published. It's as simple as that. 8. What is your one piece of advice for budding and emerging writers in Pakistan? I know this is an absolutely cutthroat and unforgiving industry, but it is so essential to believe in your voice… and yourself. This industry will do its best to bring you down, but if you persevere, it can also reward you. There are some wonderful people here, and if you stick around long enough, you'll get to be a part of that wonderful community. All you need is that one person to believe in your work. Never give up, no matter what happens.
