Macedonia
Petar Andonovski
Petar Andonovski (born 1987, Kumanovo) is mainly a prose writer. He has a degree in general and comparative literature from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje and has been a writer in residence in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro.
Currently, he works for the Polica publishing house.
- His novel “Телото во кое треба да се живее” (“The Body One Must Live In”) received the 2015 National Novel of the Year Award.
- His other work includes “Ментален простор” (“Mental Space”, poetry collection, 2008),
- “Oчи со боја на чевли” (“Shoe-colored Eyes”, novel, 2013),
- “Лето во кое те нема” (“Summer without you”, novel, 2020).
FEAR OF BARBARIANS
Several days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, three foreigners (two men and a woman) arrive at the small southernmost Greek island of Gavdos, where an isolated community of villagers seems to be frozen in time and to have been forgotten by the world. The voices of two female narrators, the foreigner Oksana and the local Penelope, tell the story of this novel. Their interchanging narratives are emotional accounts of their lives and their experiences on the island. The newcomer Oksana speaks about her escape from the Chernobyl disaster and Ukraine, the death of her partner Evgeni on the island, and her lurking fears about her uncertain future. Fears about the future are shared by the young local woman Penelope, raised and educated in a monastery and then isolated and trapped in an unhappy marriage on the island.
Otherness and alienation are the underlying themes of the novel, which questions the notions of construction and reality until its very end.