Balsam Karam for Event Horizon

"If you ever wonder why fiction matters, read this radiant and defiant book." — Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital

"Balsam Karam’s Event Horizon is a parable for our times. With the power of myth and the lyricism of an epic poem, the novel grapples with so much of what we are witnessing around us across the globe: oppression, torture, migration, division and humans having to negotiate impossible bargains. This philosophical and existential novel had me gripped from beginning to end. Karam’s voice – urgent and essential – penetrates deep and will stay with me." — Joanna Pocock, author of Greyhound

Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich, where mothers and daughters, banished from society, make their living – without rights, access to care, or legal status. But Milde refuses to accept the order of things and, together with some friends, she revolts against the government’s injustice. Arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Milde is eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or, as part of an experiment, to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass. She chooses the Mass, opting to face its fathomless depth and loneliness rather than hurt the morale of her weary allies back home.

Collapsing and expanding myth and reality, Event Horizon is an exquisite existential novel, dark as deep space, woven with reflections on oppression, solidarity, trauma and loss.

Balsam Karam is of Iranian-Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author, librarian and university lecturer, and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and has now been translated into English by Saskia Vogel. The Singularity was shortlisted for the August Prize and is her first English-language publication.

Saskia Vogel is an award-winning Swedish-American translator and author. Permission, her debut novel, has been published in English, Spanish, French and Swedish in 2019. She has translated leading Swedish authors such as Karolina Ramqvist, Katrine Marcal, and Lena Andersson. Her translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Granta, Guernica, The White Review, The Offing, Paris Review Daily, and The Quietus. Her translation of Lina Wolff’s The Polygot Lovers was awarded the English PEN Translates award.