ICR Romanian Cultural Institute London

Filip Florian @ Edinburgh International Book Festival

           

Filip Florian will be present at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with his debut novel Little Fingers, first published by Polirom in 2005 and by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in English, in 2009.

The novel is a strange story of war, death, alienation, politics and bizarre miracles told in brilliant prose. During the construction of a church, a mass grave filled with skeletal remains is discovered in a small Romanian town. The local police chief hopes to rise to fame by proclaiming the piles of bones evidence of a brutal genocide committed by the secret police of the former regime. Petrus, an eager young archeologist, has come to town to excavate the grave site, which is near an ancient Roman fort, but Major Maxim refuses to allow him near the bones. Many characters and overlapping stories can cause confusion but never boredom as everyone awaits the arrival of a group of forensic anthropologists from Argentina (a country of mass graves) to settle the dispute over how the victims ended up dumped indiscriminately together.

Filip Florian (b. 1968) worked as a journalist for the Romanian Cuvantul (The Word) weekly magazine and as a Radio Free Europe reporter. He spent five years in the mountain town of Sinaia writing his first novel Little Fingers, which was published to great critical acclaim by Polirom in 2005. Greeted as the work of a distinctive and original new voice, the novel was awarded the Romania literara (Literary Romania) Prize for Debut and the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Best Prose Debut.

The author will also be discussing with writers Norman Stone and Stephen Vizinczey on the theme After the Wall: European Classics Revisited.

When: 19 August 2010, 3.30pm;
Where: ScottishPower Studio Theatre, Edinburgh International Book Festival.