Reaching Mithymna
Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos
Reaching Mithymna describes the Syrian refugee crisis from a Canadian volunteer’s perspective. Secondary theme of the search for identity, familial and ethnic or cultural: Heighton’s mother emigrated from Greece.
Will appeal to politically-minded readers interested in current events, readers of memoir, first-generation North Americans, readers interested in diaspora narratives, readers interested in the intersections of poetry and protest/political action (cf Carolyn Forche’s poetry of witness.)
Content comps include Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Theresa Thornhill’s Hara Hotel (Verso; pb not yet released), Kate Evans’ Threads, graphic nonfiction on the refugee situation at Calais. (Verso; no pb), Roberta Gately's Footprints in the Dust (about Africa and her decades working as a nurse there)
Heighton is a highly regarded novelist, short story writer, and poet. His novel Afterlands was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a “best of year” selection in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK, and has been optioned for film by Pall Grimsson and is in pre-production.
Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep, a book of fiction about refugees set in Cyprus, was praised by Annie Proulx ("This book won't let the reader sleep... a rich and disturbing literary thriller”) and received a starred review in Library Journal.
NYT review and Granta excerpt are expected.
Steven Heighton’s most recent books are The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep, a novel that has just been optioned for film, and The Waking Comes Late, which received the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. His work has received four gold National Magazine Awards and has appeared in Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, London Review of Books, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Poetry, TLR, and five editions of Best Canadian Stories. His novel Afterlands was cited on year-end lists in the USA, the UK, and Canada, and is in pre-production for film. In 2020 he will publish two books, a nonfiction account of the Middle Eastern refugee influx on Lesvos, Greece, and a children's book drawing on the same events. Heighton is also a translator, an occasional teacher, and a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review.
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