Read more
If it ever falls to you, my reader (though God forbid!) to see your name written on a prison wall and followed by the letters 'LYMTL', that will simply mean 'Love You More Than Life'. These letters are no harder to remember than 'KGB'. GREY IS THE COLOUR OF HOPE is the searing account of the author's experiences in a brutal Soviet labour camp. Only twenty-eight when she was imprisoned for her poetry, Irina Ratushinskaya was already regarded as a leading writer of her generation, in the line of Mandelstam and Pushkin. She nearly died from maltreatment and a series of hunger strikes before eventually finding freedom. With surprising moments of humour, her inspiring memoir reveals how a group of incarcerated women built for themselves a life of selfless courage, order and mutual support.
About the author
Born in Ukraine in 1954, Irina Ratushinskaya was a leading Russian poet and dissident, who was sentenced in 1983 to seven years' hard labour and five years' internal exile for her poetry, deemed to be 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda'. She was unaware that her poems had been smuggled out and published in Britain by Bloodaxe in 1986, and that an international campaign had been mounted on her behalf. Following a series of hunger strikes, she was released in October that year. Initially she and her husband moved to the US, then spent ten years in Britain before returning to Russia in 1998 with their twin sons. In addition to her poetry, she wrote the memoirs
Grey is the Colour of Hope (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989) and
In the Beginning (Hodder &Stoughton, 1991), as well as the novels
The Odessans (1996) and
Fictions and Lies (1999). She died of cancer in 2017.
