Product details
- ISBN 9781803096711
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Dec 2026
- Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Available for the first time in English, Hungarian writer Edina Szvoren's short story collection gives voice to lives shaped by repression, cruelty, and silence.
Moments from the Life of a Hedgehog and Other Stories introduces English-language readers to the unsettling, exacting fiction of Hungarian author Edina Szvoren. Disturbing yet deliberately modest, these stories evoke a claustrophobic world of compromise and quiet desperation: fractured families warped by history and habit, boarding schools and workplaces ruled by cruelty, and domestic interiors heavy with unspoken dread. Set in the final decades of Hungarian socialism and its immediate aftermath, Szvoren’s sharply observed miniatures are animated by ever-shifting perspectives—outsiders, misfits, refusers—struggling to make sense of lives largely beyond their control. Grotesque without excess, absurd without relief, Szvoren’s narrative voices overlap and collide in ways that recall Franz Kafka and István Örkény. Yet her work remains firmly grounded in the body: queasy, intimate, and insistently physical, with a feminist and existential charge. Among polyester ornaments and unbearable family encounters, these stories offer a powerful, understated testimony to the unheard—and the nearly unhearable.
Edina Szvoren was born in 1974 in Budapest, where she teaches solfeggio and music theory. She started publishing short stories and novels in 2005. Her short story collection There Is None, Nor Let There Be won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2015. Ottilie Mulzet has translated over eighteen volumes of Hungarian poetry and prose from contemporary authors such as Gábor Schein, László Földényi, Krisztina Tóth, and many others. Her translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was awarded the National Book Award in Translated Literature in 2019.
