Born in Durres, Albania, Elvira Dones is a novelist, screenwriter and documentary film-maker currently dividing her time between the US, Switzerland and Albania. After seven novels in Albanian, she wrote the two most recent in Italian, her adopted language: Vergine giurata (Sworn Virgin, 2007) and Piccola guerra perfetta (Small Perfect War, 2010) about the Kosovo war. In her prize-winning documentary on the phenomenon of 'sworn virgins' in Albania, Dones interviews six survivors of the practice, one of whom emigrated to the US like Hana in the novel. A film adaptation of the novel Sworn Virgin was released in 2015. Clarissa Botsford studied Italian at Cambridge and Comparative Education in London before moving to Rome. She has worked in the fields of teaching, intercultural education and publishing, and is also a musician. She currently teaches English and Translation Studies at Rome University and translates contemporary Italian fiction and poetry.

‘Translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford with effortless musicality . . . I couldn’t put it down. Dones’s ability to tell a politically and psychically complex story with such lightness of touch is down to her flowing, spring-clear prose and slyly subversive vision.’

Born in Durres, Albania, Elvira Dones is a novelist, screenwriter and documentary film-maker currently dividing her time between the US, Switzerland and Albania. After seven novels in Albanian, she wrote the two most recent in Italian, her adopted language: Vergine giurata (Sworn Virgin, 2007) and Piccola guerra perfetta (Small Perfect War, 2010) about the Kosovo war. In her prize-winning documentary on the phenomenon of 'sworn virgins' in Albania, Dones interviews six survivors of the practice, one of whom emigrated to the US like Hana in the novel. A film adaptation of the novel Sworn Virgin was released in 2015. Clarissa Botsford studied Italian at Cambridge and Comparative Education in London before moving to Rome. She has worked in the fields of teaching, intercultural education and publishing, and is also a musician. She currently teaches English and Translation Studies at Rome University and translates contemporary Italian fiction and poetry.

‘Translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford with effortless musicality . . . I couldn’t put it down. Dones’s ability to tell a politically and psychically complex story with such lightness of touch is down to her flowing, spring-clear prose and slyly subversive vision.’