After breaking ties with Yugoslavia, the USSR and then China, Enver Hoxha believed that Albania could become a self-sufficient bastion of communism. Every day, many of its citizens were thrown into prisons and forced labour camps for daring to think independently, for rebelling against the regime or trying to escape. The consequences of their actions were often tragic and irreversible.

Mud Sweeter than Honey gives voice to those who lived in Albania at that time – from poets and teachers to shoe-makers and peasant farmers, and many others whose aspirations were brutally crushed in acts of unimaginable repression – creating a vivid, dynamic and often painful picture of this totalitarian state during the forty years of Hoxha’s ruthless dictatorship.

Very little emerged from Albania during communist times. With these personal accounts, Rejmer opens a window onto a terrifying period in the country’s history. Mud Sweeter than Honey is not only a gripping work of reportage, but also a necessary and unique portrait of a nation.

Join author Margo Rejmer at 5pm in virtual conversation with the two translators of her book, Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

When: November 10 at 5 pm Eastern
Where: McNally Jackson (New York, NY) via Zoom

Małgorzata (Margo) Rejmer, born in 1985 in Warsaw, is an award-winning Polish novelist, reporter, and writer of short stories. Her books, which have been translated into eight languages, include the novel Toximia (2009) and two works of nonfiction: Bucharest: Dust and Blood (2013), which won the Newsweek Award for best book of 2014, the Gryfia Literary Award, and the TVP Kultura Award, and Mud Sweeter than Honey (2018), for which she was was awarded the Polityka Passport, the most prestigious prize in Poland for emerging artists, as well as the Arkady Fiedler Award. She holds the title of the Young Ambassador of the Polish Language. She lives in Warsaw and Tirana.

Zosia Krasodomska-Jones is a literary translator working from Polish. Since being selected for the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship in 2018 with Antonia Lloyd-Jones, she has translated several books and collaborates regularly with online journals. Mud Sweeter than Honey is her first nonfiction translation. She holds dual British-Polish citizenship and lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry, and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

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