pawel huelle

**Nominated for the 2013 Typographical Translation Design Award**

**Featured as part of the 2012 Found in Translation Award given to translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones for her services to Polish-to-English literary translation that year**

**Long-listed for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize**

'There can be little doubt the writing of these engrossing stories was something of a personal odyssey for Huelle, and, under his expert craftsmanship he guarantees a memorable journey for the reader too.'

- The TLS. 

A student pedals an old Ukraina bicycle between striking factories, delivering bulletins, in the tumultuous first days of the Solidarity movement...
A shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship anchored in the cove below, to bury a chest on the beach that later proves empty…
A prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life’s story – the failed pursuit of the world’s very first language – by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor…

The characters in Pawel Huelle’s mesmerising stories find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives; legends and histories that stretch far beyond the limits of their own lives. Against the backdrop of the Baltic coast, mythology and meteorology mix with the inexorable tide of political change: Kashubian folklore, Chinese mysticism and mediaeval scholarship butt up against the war in Chechnya, 9-11, and the struggle for Polish independence.

Central to Huelle’s imagery is the vision of the refugee – be it the Chechen woman carrying her newborn child across the Polish border (her face emblazoned on every TV screen), the survivor of the Gulag re-appearing on his friends’ doorstep, years after being presumed dead, or the stranger who befriends the sole resident of a ghostly Mennonite village in the final days of the Second World War. Each refugee carries a clue, it seems, or is in possession or pursuit of some mysterious text or book, knowing that only it – like the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’ – can decode their story. What we do with this text, this clue, Huelle seems to say, is up to us.

About the Author

Pawel Huelle worked for the Solidarity movement during the fall of the Communist regime, before becoming a journalist and TV producer. Huelle is the author of 9 books, including novels, short stories and essays. He has been shortlisted three times for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, is the winner of the Found In Translation Award (2009).

About the Translator

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by Pawel Huelle (including The Last Supper, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008), Olga Tokarczuk and Jacek Dehnel. Her latest translations of non-fiction include reportage by Wojciech Jagielski and Jacek Hugo-Bader. She also translates poetry and books for children, most recently Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak.