Nightmare of the Embryos

by Mariella Mehr, Caroline Froh (Translator)

128 pages, Paperback

Published April 14, 2026

About the author

(1947) Born in Switzerland, Mehr is a poet, novelist, and dramatist belonging to the Yeniche, a nomadic group with Scottish Traveller origins. She identifies with the Romani people and champions the causes of outsiders and oppressed minorities. She was a victim of the government project, Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse (“Relief Organisation for Rural Street Children”), which separated Yeniche children from their parents. Mehr was moved between sixteen orphanages and three reformatories as a child. She was committed to a mental institution four times and spent nineteen months in a women’s prison. She is one of the founders of the “International Romani Writer’s Association” (IRWA) in Helsinki which was dissolved in 2008 due to lack of interest by Roma writers and Roma in general. Her debut novel, “Steinzeit” (Stoneage, 1981), was met with high acclaim which, 14 books later, has only grown, and in 1998, her work was recognized with an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel. Her poetry, translated into English, is featured in The Roads of the Roma: a PEN anthology of Gypsy Writers.

http://www.vidaweb.org/twenty-gypsy-w...

Reviews

[Snail Busfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful specificity and wonderful universality

[CDF121 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A genuinely moving collection of short works, all of which are more emotive than necessarily narratively cohesive. Read this book, if you want to feel something, even if you may not understand it's whole on first reading.