In Another World: Among Europe's Dying Villages

by Tom Pow

In one of the great defining moments in human history, more people now live in cities than in rural areas, and the effects of this depopulation and the plummeting birthrate are being felt keenly throughout Europe, which has the fastest-declining population in the world. Tom Pow sets out to explore what this means in some of the most rapidly vanishing areas of Europe. From Spain to Russia, he uses the tools of his trade - travelogue, essay, story and poem - to make connections, not only with what he encounters in numerous dying villages, but to reflect on his own experiences of memory, identity and loss. In Another World is an open not an argument, but an invitation to remember, to reflect and to engage with one of the most significant social issues affecting Europe today.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, History

248 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 2012

About the author

Tom Pow is a Scottish poet, travel writer and teacher. He was born in Edinburgh in 1950. Several of his collections have won awards and three of his poetry collections have been short-listed for Scottish Book of the Year. Most recently, Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (Salt Publishing) won the poetry category in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust’s Scottish Book Awards in 2009. He has also written young adult novels, picture books, radio plays and a travel book about Peru. In the Becoming, Selected and New Poems was published by Polygon in June 2009.

He has held various writing posts, including that of Scottish/Canadian Writing Fellow, based at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and Virtual Writer in Residence (Scotland’s first) for the Scottish Library Association’s Scottish Writers Project. He was the first ever Writer in Residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival from 2001 to 2003.


From 2000 to 2009, he worked for the University of Glasgow in Dumfries, latterly as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Storytelling.

He is currently Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University Dumfries and a part-time lecturer on Lancaster University’s distance learning Masters in Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early millennium, the Scottish poet Tom Pow visited a few rural areas in Spain, France, and Russia where all younger generations had long since left to the cities, and the old way of life was clearly on its last legs. This book describes those journeys, it retells the life stories of some of the elderly villagers he met, and it attempts to sketch a general typology of the dying village. Thus, it is largely a journalistic enterprise. At the same time, however, it is an exercise in creative writing: the book contains Pow’s own poetry, and there is some apparently fictional material.

When I briefly came across In Another World: Among Europe’s Dying Villages in a Helsinki bookshop soon after its publication, its title intrigued me enough that it went on my to-read list and stayed there for many years. Yet when I was finally able to read the book, I found it nothing special. The strongest part is the firsthand encounters with locals in Spain particularly. However, for recounting the vaster demographic trends Pow lacks expertise. In Russia he was very dependent on a hired interpreter or an English-speaking priest he meets, and he never quite enters into the place. His poetry sprinkled throughout the volume is mediocre.