Category: Central Europe

  • The raw and the cooked

    A book chapter that maps the publishing platforms and relationships that determine how nonfiction storytelling reaches an audience, and puts forward an argument about what makes a piece of writing ‘authentic’.

  • The night Havel became president

    On the death of Vaclav Havel, a flashback to the night he took office; and later, a press picnic at Lany Castle when he reflected on the mistakes made during the key transitional period.

  • Synchronised fires

    In a Leipzig teaching exchange, I asked the class to respond to the writing prompt, ‘Things my father or mother never told me’. But this standard exercise has another dimension in a country where half the population was once spying on the other half.

  • Bank notes

    The Eurozone crisis sparked memories of the hard lessons learned in 1992 Prague: if Czechs and Slovaks were not going to have a common economic policy, all the logic pointed to separate currencies.

  • The road to Berlin / the road to Moscow

    A footbridge across Poland’s main east-west motorway brings home the geopolitics of Poland, a flat country with no natural defences, caught between two great powers. And now, our world feels very troubled again.