The ACF London is delighted to welcome the acclaimed Austrian novelist, playwright and essayist Kaśka Bryla for a special evening presenting her most recent novel mein vater, der gulag, die krähe und ich. Kaśka Bryla will read selected passages which will also be available in a sample translation by Sheridan Marshall. After the reading, Kaśka Bryla and Sheridan Marshall will discuss the novel, its themes and the process of literary translation.
The event will be chaired by Andrea Capovilla, Director of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature and Culture, and will conclude with an audience Q&A session.
This bilingual event is accessible to non-German speakers.
The novel is set in the now strangely distant Covid years. The narrator lives in a caravan community on the wooded outskirts of Leipzig in the company of other people but is self-isolating due to her severe case of Covid which turns into Long Covid. The summer of 2020 is hot and beautiful, and yet fear and uncertainty reign everywhere, also within the medical establishment the narrator is confronted with. The narrator is strengthened by inner conversations with her father, who was interned in the Gulag as a member of the Polish underground army. His resistance has shaped her and she wants to write his story also in order to process her grief about his death from lung cancer. Her own struggle for a self-determined life as a queer woman feels similar and yet very different. But she is also strengthened by the stranded baby crow Karl, whom she cares for as long as it cannot fly. Lovingly, laconically and sometimes surreally, Kaśka Bryla interweaves shots of conversations with her father, feverish dreams and loneliness. Courageous and tender, Kaśka Bryla's novel tells of the struggle for survival under difficult conditions.
Kaśka Bryla is a novelist, dramatist and essayist who grew up between Vienna and Warsaw. She studied economics in Vienna and literary writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, where she co-founded the literary magazine PS – Political Writing in 2015. Her works include the play Im Herzen der Krähen and the novels Roter Affe (2020) and Die Eistaucher (2022). mein vater, der gulag, die krähe und ich was published in the summer of 2025 and was on the longlist for the Austrian Book Prize 2025.
Sheridan Marshall is a freelance editor and literary translator. She has been part of the editorial team for New Books in German for fifteen years. She was Deputy Editor of The Austrian Riveter.
