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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > Kolyma Diaries

Kolyma Diaries

From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world’s last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his ‘fellow travellers’, the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia.

‘Hugo-Bader doesn’t do things by half… He leaves us with a sense of wonder’ Kapka Kassabova

Author

Jacek Hugo-Bader

Jacek Hugo-Bader

Books

Kolyma Diaries

Born in 1957, Jacek Hugo-Bader is a Polish journalist for the leading daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. He is a former special needs teacher, loader of trucks, weigher of pigs, and counsellor of troubled couples. He lives in Warsaw. White Fever is his first book to be translated into English.

Translator

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Books

Like Eating a Stone

Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life

The Assassin from Apricot City

Kolyma Diaries

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a freelance editor and translator. Her translations from Polish include works by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Paweł Huelle, of which the novels Who was David Weiser? and Mercedes-Benz were both short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.

Published by

Portobello Books, 2014
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From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world’s last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his ‘fellow travellers’, the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia.

‘Hugo-Bader doesn’t do things by half… He leaves us with a sense of wonder’ Kapka Kassabova

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