Ioana Pârvulescu's "Jonah and His Daughter" Launches at Barbican Library

Award-winning Romanian author Ioana Pârvulescu and former BBC World Service journalist George Stănică will discuss "Jonah and His Daughter", the latest book by Ioana Pârvulescu to be translated into English by Alistair Ian Blyth for Istros Books, hot off the printing press. This event is organised by the Romanian Cultural Institute in London, Istros Books and Barbican Library. Do not miss this journey into the most profound depths of literature, its sources of inspiration and the strive to present one's work to increasingly larger audiences through translation!

Jonah and His Daughter offers us an affectionate and vivid account of the reluctant, recalcitrant prophet Jonah, passed down from mother to daughter over the course of thousands of years, from the eighth century B.C. to the present day. In a sweeping narrative that pans out from the ancient port of Jaffa in the eastern Mediterranean to the modern-day cities of Prague, Munich, London and Bucharest, the first storyteller we meet is Jonah’s daughter herself, and the last is a proud mother of twins in our own time. A colourful, variegated tapestry of tales within tales that inter-weaves myth, legend, family histories, and psychologies, the novel expands upon a familiar Biblical story to meditate on permanence and change, on the unfolding of self through storytelling, and the irreducible mystery of the narrated self.

Ioana Pârvulescu was born in Brașov and studied at the University of Bucharest. She graduated in 1983 and went on to complete a PhD in literature in 1999. She teaches modern literature at the same university. She has worked at the literary journal România literară and has translated the works of Maurice Nadeau, Angelus Silesius and Rainer Maria Rilke. She is a member of the Romanian Writers' Association. In 2013, Ioana Pârvulescu won the EU Prize for Literature for her book „Viața începe vineri” / "Life Begins on Friday". In 2018, she won the professional prize at the European Union Prize for Literature writing contest for her work of short fiction "A Voice". She has written four very successful novels, as well as poetry, children's books and essays in her native Romania. Her novels "Life Begins on Friday" (2016) and "Jonah and His Daughter" (2024) are both published by Istros Books, London.

George Stanica worked as a radio producer, presenter, and correspondent with the BBC World Service in London. He taught and translated English, American, and German literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. His literary articles have been published or broadcast in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Romania. He has a BA in English, American, and German literature and wrote a dissertation on Saul Bellow. At present, he is a freelance translator and writer/journalist in the UK.