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Burying the Typewriter

Carmen Bugan
€17.50
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A01=Carmen Bugan
Author_Carmen Bugan
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Category=DNC
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ceausescu
Cold War
coming of age
communism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
exile
forthcoming
inspirational
memoir
oppression
personal
protest
romania
Soviet Union
surveillance
survival
true story

Product details

  • ISBN 9781035096213
  • Weight: 200g
  • Dimensions: 132 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 11 Jun 2026
  • Publisher: Pan Macmillan
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

‘A modern classic’ – The Sunday Times

‘This story starts roughly in the 1970s, a few years after I was born, about the time when I began to have memories and my father’s codename was already long established as “Andronic”, a name we learned about only last summer . . .’

Burying the Typewriter is the haunting true story of life behind the Iron Curtain, and one teenage girl’s flight from the Romanian secret police and the Ceausescu regime.

At 2 a.m. on 10 March 1983, Carmen Bugan’s father left the family home, alone. That afternoon, Carmen returned from school to find officers of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, in her living room. Her father had been detained for his protests against the Communist regime in Romania, and the family home was now laced with surveillance devices. Overnight, Carmen’s life became a living hell of paranoia and small-scale resistance, her schoolteachers and the friends and neighbours all around her transformed into potential informants.

Burying the Typewriter is the extraordinary story of Carmen’s coming of age in the twilight years of Ceausescu’s rule. Above all, it is a luminous, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest book about the price of courage, the pain of exile, and the power of memory.

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.
About Carmen Bugan
Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is an award-winning author of ten books that include memoir, essays, and criticism. Her work has been translated into several languages, gathered international praise, and been widely anthologized. Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems won a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and her book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, was named ‘an essential book for writers’ by Poets and Writers magazine. She wrote a highly praised monograph, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Her most recent collections of poems are Time Being and Tristia. Carmen's memoir, Burying the Typewriter, won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and has been featured on NPR, ABC, PRI and the BBC. Carmen was educated at the University of Michigan (BA), Lancaster University, UK (MFA), and Oxford University, UK (DPhil). She received fellowships from Wolfson College Oxford, Arts Council England, and the Hawthornden Retreat for Writers.

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