麻豆约拍

The Fall of Ceau葯escu in 1989 ended 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. How did the experience of living through that make its way into fiction? Georgina Harding published In Another Europe: A Journey To Romania in 1990 and followed that with a novel The Painter of Silence, set in Romania of the 1950s. Mircea C膬rt膬rescu was born in 1956 and has published novels, poems and essays. In the novel Nostalgia published in 1989, he looks at communist Bucharest in the 80s, in a dreamlike narrative seen in part through the eyes of children and young adults. Philippe Sands has chronicled Jewish histories in Eastern Europe in his books and podcast series The Ratline. He recommends Mihail Sebastian's book For Two Thousand Years.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Image: Romanian author Mircea C膬rt膬rescu

You can find a playlist called Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking website, which contains other conversations organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. /programmes/p047v6vh