Kinderland by Liliana Corobca

A beautiful and heartrending short novel that unfolds through the unanswered letters of a young girl to her absent parents, relaying lively tales of cruel pranks and jovial reconciliations, pain and tenderness, despair and hope of real-life young children who grow up alone.

“In [Kinderland] Liliana Corobca has painstakingly examined…locations and territories that resemble Lord of the Flies… and has written a novel that is complicated and harsh, but also moving and full of candor.” —Observator Cultural

With her parents gone in search of work, twelve-year-old Cristina must act as a mother to her two younger brothers. Through her eyes, we roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village populated almost entirely with children and old people. Just as most of the inhabitants left their countryside and homes with the desire to earn a better income, their parents also went to the world for money, the mother to Italy, the father to Siberia, and the children were left to fend for themselves. Here the youth must learn to survive on their own; they grow up fast, imitating the gestures of the absent adults, and chasing their fading memories of normal family life.

This follow-up to Liliana Corobca’s critically-acclaimed novel of censorship in eastern Europe, The Censor’s Notebook is a novel that deals with a painful true reality, which has over time grown to become a phenomenon: the lives and struggles of children left home alone by parents who have gone to work abroad.

Story Locale: Romania

LILIANA COROBCA is a writer and researcher of communist censorship in Romania. She was born in the Republic of Moldova and is the author of the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for debut fiction. She is also the author of the novels The Censor’s Notebook (Seven Stories Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013), and The Old Maids’ Empire (2015). She has received grants and artists’ residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland.

MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.

Author Residence: Bucharest, Romania / translator: Bucharest, Romania

Author Hometown: Moldova