Vesna Goldsworthy

Vesna Goldsworthy's memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries, was published by Atlantic in March 2005 to broad critical acclaim. It was serialised in The Times and read by Vesna herself as Book of the Week on Radio Four. The German translation will be published as Heimweh Nach Nirgendwo (''Homesickness for Nowhere'') by Hanser Deuticke as their lead autumn title.

Vesna was born in Belgrade in 1961. She was already an acclaimed poet and a presenter of a fashionable radio programme when she left Yugoslavia in 1986 to marry an Englishman she had met at the Karl Marx Institute in Bulgaria two years earlier. Since arriving in England, she has worked in publishing, for the BBC World Service, and as a university teacher. Her first book, Inventing Ruritania, a study of the 'Wild East' of Europe in literature and film has been translated into Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian and Serbian.

She currently teaches English at Kingston University and is Director of Kingston's Centre for Suburban Studies, which she founded in 2004, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL.  She lives in West London with her husband and young son.

''I really loved this book and couldn't put it down. Chernobyl Strawberries passed my very simple test for what makes a really good read - I just wanted to know what happened next. It is incredible to think that the Belgrade where Vesna Goldsworthy grew up - and which she describes so brilliantly - is now an utterly vanished world, despite existing right into the 1980s.'' Tim Judah, author of The Serbs.

www.chernobylstrawberries.com