Manaschi - Paperback

by Hamid Ismailov (Author), Donald Rayfield (Translator)

Finalist, Prix Jan Michalski de Littérature 2023

Shortlisted, EBRD Literature Prize 2022

In his latest tragicomedy Hamid Ismailov interrogates the interaction between tradition and modernity, myth and reality.

A radio presenter interprets one of his dreams as an initiation by the world of spirits into the role of a Manaschi, a Kyrgyz bard and shaman who recites and performs the epic poem, Manas, and is revered as someone connected with supernatural forces. Travelling to his native mountainous village, populated by Tajiks and Kyrgyz, and unravelling his personal and national history, our hero Bekesh instead witnesses a full re-enactment of the epic's wrath.

Author Biography

Born in 1954 in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed 'unacceptable democratic tendencies'. He came to the United Kingdom, where he took a job with the BBC World Service where he worked for 25 years. His works are banned in Uzbekistan. Several of his Russian-original novels have been published in English translation, including The Railway, The Dead Lake, which was long listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Underground. The Devils' Dance is the first of his Uzbek novels to appear in English, and the translation by Donald Rayfield and John Farndon won the 2019 ERBD Literature Prize. His second book published by Tilted Axis Press is Of Strangers and Bees, about an Uzbek writer in exile who traces the fate of the medieval polymath Avicenna.

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia. He translated Georgian and Russian poets and prose writers.