A voice of rare intensity and moral clarity in contemporary European literature, award-winning author Liliana Corobca opens the second day of this year’s European Writers’ Festival with a powerful exploration of memory, displacement, and survival.
Date & time: Sunday 17 May, 11:30 am
Location: Pigott Theatre, British Library
TICKETS:£6 - £15 |WEEKEND PASS: £24.50
BOOK HERE & festival programme
Corobca joins writers Fabio Andina (Switzerland) and Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs (Faroe Islands) for Personal Histories, a panel chaired by broadcaster and artist Bidisha Mamata at the British Library. Bringing together three distinct literary voices, the event transforms personal memory into gripping narratives of history, offering rare insight into three lesser-known European regions — Moldova, Ticino, and the Faroe Islands — through stories that are at once intimate and deeply unsettling.
At the heart of Liliana Corobca’s contribution is her latest novel, Too Great a Sky, translated by Monica Cure and published in 2024 by Seven Stories Press. Through the voice of Ana, a woman forced to flee Bukovina under Soviet occupation, the novel captures the emotional and psychological toll of exile, tracing a life shaped by rupture, resilience, and the enduring power of memory. In a Times Literary Supplement review, author and academic Costica Bradatan writes: “One of the novel’s remarkable accomplishments is the complex fictional universe that Corobca creates though the lens of Ana: a peasant woman reflecting on a life caught up in the wheels of twentieth- century history. […] She has undergone horrendous trials, yet has survived to tell the story, her humanity intact.”
Alongside the Moldovan-Romanian author, Fabio Andina recounts the story of his grandfather, imprisoned during the Second World War for helping Jews escape, while Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs brings a contrasting yet equally compelling perspective through her vivid and life-affirming narratives from the Faroe Islands. Together, the three authors map a literary terrain where personal histories illuminate broader European realities.
LILIANA COROBCA is a Moldovan-Romanian writer and researcher based in Bucharest, the author of nine novels, including A Year in Paradise, Kinderland, Ladybird, The Master and Makarenko. Her work has been translated into Albanian, Azerbaijani, Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish and has received the Prize for Prose Debut of the Republic of Moldova Writers’ Union in 2003; the Crystal Award at the International Festival in Vilenica, Slovenia, for the novel Kinderland; the Prose Award given by Radio Romania Cultural for Kinderland in 2014; the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2023 for The Censor’s Notebook; shortlisted for EBRD Literature Prize and Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025 with the novel Too Great A Sky. Corobca’s writing explores themes of migration, literary exile, censorship under communism, marginalized characters, deportation, survival in extreme situations, etc.
The European Writers’ Festival is organised by EUNIC London in partnership with the British Library and the European Literature Network. The Programming Panel is chaired by Rosie Goldsmith. The festival is supported by the EU Delegation to the UK and the European Parliament Liaison Office in the UK. The 3rd edition of the European Writers’ Festival (16-17 May 2026) brings together writers from 26 countries, creating a vibrant platform for dialogue around themes such as love, war, humour, nature, crime, myth, and memory. The festival also foregrounds the vital role of literature and translation in navigating the complexities of contemporary Europe, showcasing a rich diversity of voices where genres intersect and storytelling continues to evolve.
