The award-winning Ukrainian novelist and short story writer Natalia Matolinets is fascinated by the layers of common history shared by the cities of central Europe. She was born and lives in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, which, she says, has many similarities to Prague, both in its beauty and in the complexity of its past. She is in Prague for a two-month residency, as part of the UNESCO City of Literature project. David Vaughan went to meet her in the atmospheric café of the Scouts’ Institute, in the courtyard of one of the old houses on the Old Town Square.
“I’m a writer, whose speciality is urban fantasy and talking about cultural heritage and combining it with urban legends and magic. And I am very interested in exploring Prague because it’s part of my new project. It’s not my first project about Prague. I already have one trilogy, also of urban fantasy, which takes place in Lviv and Prague and Budapest, so I really wanted to come here and spend some more time here. From the first time I visited the city I knew that this is perhaps where my stories belong, and this year one of my books was actually published in the Czech Republic. This is an urban fantasy that takes place in Lviv, but later on the characters move to Prague to explore it as well.”
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Author: David Vaughan