Pedophobia – the excessive fear of children – is a staple within the horror genre, unsettling and interrogating our primal instinct towards nurturing the young. There’s the sadistic son in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, the adolescent cult in Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, or the tribal warfare of stranded schoolboys Read More
Maxim Biller was born in 1960 in Prague. In order to escape from The Prague Spring, his family emigrated to Germany in 1970. There Biller studied literature, then got involved in journalism which subsequently brought him the Theodor Wolff Prize, one of the most prestigious German awards in the field. An author of several story Read More
Knut Hamsun (1859 – 1952) was born into poverty in the Norwegian municipality of Lom; his early years were predominantly filled with what have become joyless, and often painful memories. He eventually found refuge in the world of literature, which he did not abandon until his death. His name was established with Hunger (1890), followed Read More
A journalist and published poet, Ukrainian writer Liubov Holota became a Shevchenko Laureate after receiving the Shevchenko Premier for her debut novel Episodic Memory. Framed by the forty day vigil for her dead mother, the novel sets up vignettes of one woman’s childhood in the Ukrainian Steppe in the 1950s. Holota’s novel is fully transportive Read More
