WINNER OF ENGLISH PEN AWARD 2023

SHORTLISTED FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE 2024

‘How did these stories get into your hands? They flew, as if painted by Marc Chagall, through prison walls, borders, and languages.’ - Valzhyna Mort

‘It’s a terse account of painful experience, prison, bewilderment; hugely atmospheric and extremely funny – full of dry wit and small biting observations.’ - Anna Vaught

100 stories written from prison in Belarus with 'echoes of early Chekhov, Zoshchenko and Samuel Beckett' (Michael Pursglove). Despite its bleak context, this is a fundamentally optimistic book, engaging comically, yet honestly, with what it means to be human. Translated from the Russian by Jim and Ella Dingley. With an introduction by ‘risen star of the international poetry world’ Valzhyna Mort.

Prizes

Winner of Pen Translates 2023

Maxim Znak's message is that wry humour and humanity trump the cruel absurdities of the regime [...] These stories, one hundred of them, none longer than three pages, have echoes of early Chekhov, Zoshchenko and Samuel Beckett and, ultimately, of Giovanni Boccaccio and Vernon Kress, who used the punning title for his 1991 novel of the Gulag. 

- Michael Pursglove

The fact that this book exists at all should be a miracle. Simply because the stories were smuggled out … The true sensation, however, is the mental achievement the prisoner Maxim Znak was capable of: that in his situation, which could really be called hopeless, he still possesses the internal freedom to create literature.

- Cornelia Geissler, Berliner Zeitung

[Znak] uses the weapons that dictators like Lukashenko detest most: humour, wit, publicity.

- Jens Uthoff, taz.die tageszeitung

It's a terse account of painful experience, prison, bewilderment; hugely atmospheric and extremely funny – full of dry wit and small biting observations.

- Anna Vaught

Born in Minsk in 1981, Maxim Znak is an international lawyer from Belarus. After the presidential election of August 2020, he gathered hard evidence of the many violations of the electoral process and sought to take legal action by ensuring that the election results were reviewed by an independent body. Maxim Znak was arrested on 9 September 2020 and held in Remand Prison no. 1 in Minsk until 26 December 2021. This prison has the shocking reputation of being the only one in Europe where the death penalty is still being carried out. It was here that Znak wrote his stories, which later found themselves outside the prison walls.

Once outside, the stories were sent directly to Jim Dingley who previously translated two books from Belarus for Scotland Street Press. Dingley immediately sent the manuscript to Scotland Street Press. Its arrival was a huge consideration: would its publication endanger Znak's life, or agitate successfully for his release? By September 2021 this brilliant lawyer was already re-sentenced to ten years in a penal colony in the North of Belarus. His wife and sister urged to go ahead with publication.

Valzhyna Mort was born in the same city and same year as Znak. She is a poet who writes in English and Belarusian. Her most recent volume of poetry, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, was published to great critical acclaim in 2020. She is the recipient of many international literary awards. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English, Cornell University, Ithaca NY.