Four Minutes - Deleva, Nataliya

. .

Résumé :
Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centers around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girl--a choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women. In addition to Leah's narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathize with them. A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe.--Provided by publisher.

Biographie:
Nataliya Deleva is a Bulgarian-born writer living in London. Her debut novel Four Minutes won the Best Debut Novel Award (Peroto Literary Awards 2018), Second Prize for Debut Prose (Southern Spring, 2018) and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year (13 Centuries Bulgaria, 2018). Her short fiction, novel excerpts, essays, book reviews and interviews appeared in literary journals and anthologies, such as Words Without Borders, Fence, Asymptote, Empty Mirror, Exchanges Literary Journal, Project Plume, the European First Novelist Festival anthology (Hungary, 2019), Stories From the 90s anthology (ICU Publishing, 2019) and Granta Bulgaria. Deleva recently completed her second novel, Arrival, written simultaneously in English and Bulgarian.