Trafika Europe 1 - Northern Idyll

debut in our pages, we've decided to showcase a hefty entire chapter here.

Another highlight of this issue's Northern Idyll is the taut, evocative prose of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's The Heart of Man , the final novel of his masterful Icelandic trilogy. It's not yet available in English – you can read it only here. And there's poetry from Shetland Scots, a dialect which retains strong ties to Old Norse, with echoes in the musculature of present-day English. Christine de Luca, the new Poet Laureate of Edinburgh, performed in our launch events in the Edinburgh Festival and was a bit taken aback that we're only presenting her poems in English "translation" here. Stay tuned, when Trafika Europe Radio starts up we'll feature an invigorating reading from her in her native Shetland dialect. This issue also features dream-like new prose from Slovenia, poetry from Occitan – in pieces like supernally polished stones – and new French fiction exploring mathematician Gödel's flight from the Nazis to Princeton, and much more. All title pages showcase sublime photos of Europe by our guest artist for this issue, Mark Chester. We've made this quarterly journal to feel like a print digest online, so feel free to slow down – if you're on a PC then please go "full-screen" via the icon below the book, and you can always zoom in for an even larger view – and savour with us some great new works of European literature.