Alex Christofi's Blog

THE USONIAN: What inspired you to write  Cypria ?

ALEX CHRISTOFI: I always knew I wanted to write about a book about Cyprus. For a long time, I assumed it would be a novel. I started out writing fiction, and I imagined this amazing star-crossed lovers plot set around the 1974 invasion, which would help bring general readers into understanding the complicated politics of the island. But the longer I thought about it, the less realistic it seemed. Some of the stuff I wanted to write about wouldn’...

How and when did you find out about Varosha, and what do you find interesting about it?

I remember when I was younger, being taken to a lookout post in the south east of Cyprus. There was a long telescope that pointed not at the sky, but at an empty city. I was told this was the closest we could get – that the people who lived there had fled one morning in 1974, and no one had been inside since. I remember wondering whether I would ever set foot there and dismissing it as unlikely.

Could y...

1.  Cypria  is a beautiful exploration of Cyprus’ history and its unique place in Europe, but it’s also a personal story for you as a British-Cypriot. You mention in the introduction it’s something you’ve long wanted to write about. When did you first get the idea for a book like this? Did it change as you were writing it, or is it how you envisioned it?

Growing up I always thought it was odd that there was no modern, single-volume history in English – if you wanted to learn more, people would ...

Dostoevsky, it must be said, was no saint. He was famously cantankerous; he had at least one affair during his unhappy first marriage; he was also ruinously addicted to roulette. But he had a brilliant mind, at ease with contradiction, and was determined to use literature to pursue the moral consequences of the ideas that defined his era. To do so, Dostoevsky took inspiration from the real life story of Pierre-François Lacenaire, a charismatic gentleman murderer whose trial had been the talk of ...

The world is beginning to catch up with Mary Gaitskill. In the UK, there has been renewed interest following Serpent’s Tail’s 2019 publication of her 15,000 word New Yorker story, ‘This is Pleasure’, as a slim standalone volume last year,[1] followed in 2020 by the publication of her Granta essay ‘Lost Cat’ in an equally slim volume of 90 generously leaded pages.

The raft of single-sitting books published in recent years gives one answer to how publishers can react to a cultural pace set onli...

One of the most illuminating curiosities to have emerged from the study of George Eliot’s early writing is the amount of time she spent engaging with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. She began her life of letters as Marian Evans, translating David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, which owes a debt to Spinoza, while still in her twenties. Having taught herself Latin, she pored over Spinoza’s works for over a decade before producing the first complete English language translation of the Ethics in 185...

We should never bisect the things we love. Friends, nations, puppies. I would argue an exception for pizza. But over the last 24 hours I have found that almost everyone on the internet agrees we should not chop books in half, even if they are very long.

It started when my colleague saw half a paperback on my desk and called me a “book murderer”. I had been enjoying it so much at home that I found the end of a 16-page section, chopped off the remaining pages, bound the unread half in some...

This year, Faber is reissuing five novels by Thomas Bernhard, who rose to fame as a thorn in the side of the Austrian establishment, though he comes down to us as “Austria’s finest postwar writer”, in the words of Gabriel Josipovici. The first two of these reissues,Concrete(1982) andExtinction(1986), were released in March, with beautiful abstract watercolour covers by Leanne Shapton. The latter, with its exponential curve, looks as if it might represent a Malthusian catastrophe, or perhaps,...

This year, Faber is reissuing five novels by Thomas Bernhard, who rose to fame as a thorn in the side of the Austrian establishment, though he comes down to us as “Austria’s finest postwar writer”, in the words of Gabriel Josipovici. The first two of these reissues,Concrete(1982) andExtinction(1986), were released in March, with beautiful abstract watercolour covers by Leanne Shapton. The latter, with its exponential curve, looks as if it might represent a Malthusian catastrophe, or perhaps,...

This essay was first published in Issue 3 of the Brixton Review of Books in September 2018.

On the evening of 5th July 2018, carefully selected guests filtered into Buckingham Palace for dinner with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. You might say that the invitation list had started to be compiled fifty years previously. There were ten authors present, oddly biased towards the first half of the alphabet: Julian Barnes, Paul Beatty, Peter Carey, Eleanor Catton, Kiran Desai, David Grossman, Alan Ho...