Burying the Typewriter by Carmen Bugan - ISBN: 9781035096213
Paperback
A teenage girl’s harrowing escape from Romania’s communist regime.
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Burying the Typewriter

Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police

$21.94

  • Paperback

    288 pages

  • Release Date

    29 September 2026

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Summary

This story starts roughly in the 1970s, a few years after I was born, about the time when I began to have memories and my father’s codename was already long established as “Andronic”, a name we learned about only last summer …

Burying the Typewriter is the haunting true story of life behind the Iron Curtain, and one teenage girl’s flight from the Romanian secret police and the Ceausescu regime.

At 2 a.m. on 10 March 1983, Carmen Bugan’s father left the family home, al…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781035096213
ISBN-10:1035096218
Author:Carmen Bugan
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Imprint:Picador
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:288
Release Date:29 September 2026
Weight:200g
Dimensions:17mm x 132mm x 198mm
Series:Picador Collection
Audience Age:18
A-Format
B-Format
Burying the Typewriter by Carmen Bugan - ISBN: 9781035096213
132 × 198 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

‘One of the most telling insights I’ve read about life under communism. Warm and humane’ * The Observer *
‘A modern classic’ * The Sunday Times *
‘The Securitate could not take Bugan’s memories, her compassionate heart or her clear writer’s eye … Startling warmth, perception and humanity’ * The Daily Telegraph *
‘Touched with grace’ * The Independent *
‘Imagine a Romanian Stasiland written by a poet … A song of childhood that actually seems to be warm-blooded in your hands’ * William Fiennes *

About The Author

Carmen Bugan

Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is an award-winning author of ten books that include memoir, essays, and criticism. Her work has been translated into several languages, gathered international praise, and been widely anthologized.

  • Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems won a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
  • Her book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, was named ‘an essential book for writers’ by Poets and Writers magazine.
  • She wrote a highly praised monograph, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile.
  • Her most recent collections of poems are Time Being and Tristia.
  • Carmen’s memoir, Burying the Typewriter, won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and has been featured on NPR, ABC, PRI and the BBC.

Carmen was educated at the University of Michigan (BA), Lancaster University, UK (MFA), and Oxford University, UK (DPhil). She received fellowships from Wolfson College Oxford, Arts Council England, and the Hawthornden Retreat for Writers.

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