THE TIME OF THE WASTELAND – ANNA YANKUTA

This book is an attempt to understand the timelessness in which Belarusians found themselves after 2020. It consists of real and fictional stories, accidentally heard phrases in different languages, fleeting impressions, passions and memories, what can fill life during the dictatorship in Belarus and the war in Ukraine. The storyteller is looking everywhere for human and non-human traces, plots that are unfolding right before her eyes, as well as stories that happened a long time ago and of which almost nothing remains. She tries to capture the spirit of timelessness in Warsaw and Minsk, Hrodna and Krakow, other cities and towns. The book shows the world through the eyes of a Belarusian who found herself in forced emigration and tries to understand the processes – obvious and barely perceptible – that are happening in the world now. Anna Yankuta is a Belarusian writer, translator and literary critic. She is the author of the Geology/Constitution poetry project (2022), works for children (including the series about Sprat the cat and the story “Martha and her dream of snow”), as well as articles and essays. She translates from English and Polish, translated Jane Austen’s novels “Pride and Prejudice”, Kazua Ishiguro’s “Don’t Let Me Go”, Sally Rooney’s “Normal People”, etc. into Belarusian. Among the poetic translations are poems by Bolyaslav Lesmyan, Maria Pavlikovskaya-Jasnazhevskaya, Edgar Poe, John Keats, Sara Tisdale, and others.