The Last Thing

“The very clear theatrical quality of [Lahola’s] stories, tinged as they are with a dark touch of the absurd, allows for an exploration of the realities of life during wartime intended to raise more questions than it answers. As such, The Last Thing is a long overdue opportunity for English language writers to come to appreciate the work of this remarkable Slovak writer.” * roughghosts *“Leopold Lahola was and remains a miracle of Slovak literature. Literally! At the same time, his is the story of a writer who surpassed his countrymen so much that they temporarily forgot him. But only temporarily!” * Fedor Gál, sociologist, politician, essayist and documentarian *

Leopold Lahola (1918-1968) was a Slovak Jewish fiction writer, playwright, and film director. He escaped deportation to a concentration camp and emigrated to Israel in 1949, where he worked in film before moving to West Germany. He was able to return home during the Prague Spring, when his plays were staged again in Czechoslovakia to critical acclaim.

Julia and Peter Sherwood are based in London and work as freelance translators from and into a number of Central and East European languages. Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and spent more than twenty years in the NGO sector in London before turning to freelance translation some ten years ago. Peter Sherwood’s first translations from the Hungarian appeared fifty years ago, but he was an academic for over forty years before retiring and devoting himself more or less full-time to translating.