Taras Prochasko

This most remarkable contemporary Ukrainian writer is rewriting the history of his native Carpathians, including that of the whole of Central Europe.There, as is well known, everything is interconnected and everything is related to everything. However, he does not write any alternative history, but connects places in sequences and shows that this is how human destinies are created. His texts are magical, philosophical, aesthetic, imbued with melancholy and humour. In them, the author leads the reader along blueberry trails, past old family houses on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, through stuffy compartments of Ukrainian express trains, and in the darkness of Prague cafés. Whatever he writes about, he always writes about love. If there is such a thing as Central European magical realism, this is the fundamental book.

Published by Pavel Mervart, 2021

Taras Prochasko (*1968) is a Ukrainian essayist, novelist, and translator. He graduated from the Faculty of Science and then worked at the Institute of Carpathian Forestry, later as a teacher, bartender, security guard, editor, or radio presenter. A collection of his current as well as previously unpublished work, So-It-Is, was published in 2010. The novel The UnSimple (Neprosti), (2012) has also been translated into Czech. In 2020, Prochasko received Ukraine’s most prestigious literary award, the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.