Journeys into familiar foreignness - Zsófia Bán's short stories

Zsófia Bán is both a trespasser of cultural-geographical boundaries and a builder of bridges?between continents, races, genders and languages. As an associate professor of American literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, she is also an author of two short story collections and several essay volumes. After a childhood spent in Rio de Janeiro, her family moved back to Hungary in 1969. Brought up with her parents' oppressive silence about their survival of the Holocaust, Zsófia Bán devotes her fiction to speaking the unspeakable. She is an openly feminist, gay and Jewish writer who boldly goes against all forms of intimidation, ignorance and aggression. With her style incomparable to any other contemporary Hungarian female writer, Bán's work might be linked to the theoretical and literary informedness of such British writer-academics as A. S. Byatt, Patricia Duncker or Sarah Waters?even though she herself has named Imre Kertész, Péter Nádas, Jeanette Winterson, Bruce Chatwin and W.G. Sebald as major sources of inspiration. Her two collections of short stories published so far, Evening School: A Reader for Adults (2007; German and Spanish editions: 2012, 2015) and When There Were Only Animals (2012, in German: 2014) feature all her characteristic topics such as travelling, visuality, remembering, trauma, gender roles and intertextuality.