Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

Translation of 2 books:

The Seven Churches by Miloš Urban

Translated into eleven languages and a runaway bestseller in Spain as well as the Czech Republic, The Seven Churches – by the ‘dark knight of Czech literature’, Milos Urban – is a bloody, atmospheric modern classic of crime literature and one of the most haunting and terrifying thrillers to come out of Europe in years. Written in the spirit of the sensation story but with rich Gothic overtones, The Seven Churches is set in the medieval Nove Mesto (New Town) of Prague, a quarter with seven Gothic churches. Here the narrator, known simply as K, witnesses a bizarre accident followed by a series of mysterious murders. This event triggers a series of meetings with Gothic characters who appear to be trying to reconstruct the medieval ‘golden age’ of Prague in the reign of Charles IV under the noses if its modern-day inhabitants. The first English translation by Robert Russell of Urban’s signature work is one of the events in foreign fiction this year.

Birdbrain by Johanna Sinisalo

From the author of Not Before Sundown, this novel is a skilful portrait of the unquenchable desire of Westerners for the pure and the primitive. A young Finnish couple go on the hiking trip of a lifetime in Australasia with Heart of Darkness as reading material. The trip gradually turns into a tortuous thriller with belongings disappearing and, even more mysteriously, reappearing. The travellers come to be at the mercy of untamed nature. Birdbrain reveals the dark side of the explorer’s desire: the insatiable need to control, to invade and leave one’s mark on the landscape. But what happens when nature starts to fight back?

JOHANNA SINISALO studied comparative literature and drama, amongst other subjects, at the University of Tampere. Professionally she worked in the advertising business, rising to the level of marketing designer.
An important figure in the Finnish science fiction scene in the late 1980s and early ’90s (winning a rare back-to-back collection of Atorox prizes for short fiction in the genre), she was also the first to make a breakthrough by bursting the genre barriers.

Sinisalo was awarded the Finlandia Prize for literature in 2000 for her first novel, Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (translated as Not before sundown in 2003 and again as Troll — A Love Story in 2004 for the American market