Weed time

“The Time of the Wilderness” is about what comes after. Anna Yankuta writes about the reality after 2020, when silence comes, and with it - loss, misunderstanding, and the slow return of oneself. This is Belarusian prose, where the personal becomes common. Written precisely, quietly, but very loudly. The book is available with worldwide delivery.

This book is an attempt to make sense of the timelessness in which Belarusians found themselves after 2020. It consists of real and fictional stories, accidentally heard phrases in different languages, fleeting impressions, delights and memories, of what can fill life during the dictatorship in Belarus and the war in Ukraine. The narrator looks everywhere for human and inhuman traces, plots that unfold right before our eyes, as well as stories that happened a long time ago and of which almost nothing remains. She tries to capture the spirit of timelessness in Warsaw and Minsk, Grodno and Krakow, other cities and towns. The book shows the world through the eyes of a Belarusian who found herself in forced emigration and tries to understand the processes — obvious and barely noticeable — that are taking place in the world now.

Anna Yankuta is a Belarusian writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the author of the poetry project "Geology"/"Constitution" (2022), works for children (including a series about the cat Sprat and the story "Martha and Her Dream of Snow"), as well as articles and essays. She translates from English and Polish, and has translated into Belarusian Jane Austen's novels "Pride and Prejudice", Kazuya Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go", Sally Rooney's "Normal People", etc. Among her poetic translations are poems by Boleslaw Lesmian, Maria Pawlikovskaya-Jasnazhevskaya, Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats, Sarah Tisdale, etc.