Awards

• Winner of Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing (United States).

Overview

In a searching and powerful debut memoir, award-winning poet and literary translator Ani Gjika tells a different kind of origin story by writing about the ways a woman listens to her own body, intuition, and desire. Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time when everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. When she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing, as hers does, Ani falls in love-at least, she thinks it's love. Set across Albania, Thailand, India, and the U.S., An Unruled Body is a young woman's journey to selfhood through the lenses of language, sexuality, and identity, and how she learns to find freedom of expression on her own terms.

Full Product Details

9781632063403

Table of Contents

Reviews

Praise for An Unruled Body In her courageous and profoundly moving memoir, Albanian-born poet and translator Ani Gjika reconstructs her personal history in Albania, America, and beyond, naming traumas that often remain unspoken. Gjika is unafraid to delve into the most taboo topic for a woman raised in a religious family within a patriarchal society: sex. The book that emerges is memorable, rich, and daring, simultaneously a portrait of Albania during the fall of communism; an exploration of language, desire, and power; and a bracingly honest sexual coming of age that unfolds across continents. An Unruled Body is a different kind of immigrant story, one that demands that we consider the specific, insidious ways that patriarchy controls a woman's relationship to her body, mind, and expression. With a poet's ear, Gjika finds language for confronting misogyny and the male gaze on the most intimate terms, ultimately revealing the transformational power of self-discovery through the written word. -- Prize Judges Francisco Cantú, Shuchi Saraswat, and Ilan Stavans

Author Information

Albanian-born writer Ani Gjika is the author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her translation from the Albanian of Luljeta Lleshanaku's Negative Space (New Directions and Bloodaxe Books, 2018) won an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, PEN America Award, and Best Translated Book Award. She is a graduate of Boston University's MFA program where she was a 2011 Robert Pinsky Global fellow, and GrubStreet's Memoir Incubator program, where she was a 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellow. Having taught creative writing at various universities in the U.S. and Thailand, Gjika currently teaches English as a Second Language at Framingham High School in Massachusetts.

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