Читать книгу HOME IS ELSEWHERE: An Anthology - The Reader Berlin - Страница 5

As a child, my home was a farm in the south west of England. Now, I cannot think of a better place to grow up, but at the time I longed for the elsewheres I read about in books, and as soon as I could, I set off to find them. Elsewheres are rather moreish, and it’s all too easy to imagine the next will be the one for you. Eventually, I came to Berlin where I founded The Reader. By some strange magic, the best part of a decade later, Berlin is home too. Writing this brings to mind the moment when you look at someone you love and remember when they were still a stranger, wondering at which point the balance tipped, and how easily it might have tipped the other way.

Berlin is home, but like the lover who keeps surprising you, the city has too many faces to ever entirely lose its elsewhere-quality, so the theme ‘Home is Elsewhere’ - chosen for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize - is an apt one. It’s a doubly fitting choice since this year’s prize is a month’s residency in the Circus Hotel, a thrilling and gorgeous location for an author to feel not quite at home, to enjoy elsewhere at its most seductive. I’m certain our prize winner Dolores Walshe, whose entry The Wooden Box so impressed our judges, will write great things there.

Seductive is a good word to describe this anthology. Poised, unnerving, moving, daring and everything imbetween, the ten winning submissions showcased here were selected from hundreds of entries by our panel of judges. Reading them is a pleasure, publishing them an honour. Each author has taken the theme and interpreted it in an entirely singular way – from Sophie Mackintosh’s raw and wringing Holiday with T, to the mysterious journey hinted at in Daisy Johnson’s Sylvia; from the disintegrating home in Head like a Hole by Amy Lee Lillard, to Lei Wang’s elegant meditation on the meaning of home in FLYING LESSONS.

I hope that you enjoy reading them and discovering these wonderful writers.Of course, as I write this, it occurs to me that reading is an activity that allows you to be at home and elsewhere at the same time …

Victoria Gosling

Berlin, 2018