Connected Stories
Manuela Feri
London
Manuela Feri was born in Pogradec, Albania, in 1987. At the age of eleven, she moved to Greece, carrying with her the lake-town light of her childhood and the quiet courage of a new language. She moved to London when she was 30. The first book she ever read was Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, at eight years old — the beginning of a lifelong discovery of literature, with Russian writers holding a particularly soft spot in her heart. She began writing her own stories between the ages of twelve and thirteen. The Violet Valley is not a novel but a series of connected stories: part personal diary, part childhood memory, woven through metaphor and allegory, and suspended somewhere between reality and fairytale. Completed one year ago, it offers an intimate sense of her childhood and the idiosyncrasy of her soul. Absences is one of four books of fiction short stories written between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four — a softer, more tender break from her heavier, heart-wrenching novels.
