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Christos Tsiolkas' first novel, Loaded, (turned into the feature film, Head On directed by Ana Kokkinos) was published in 1994 by Random House. He is the author of the novel The Jesus Man (1999 Random House) and of the dialogue, Jump Cuts (Random House, 1996), co-written with Sasha Soldatow. He has also published a monograph essay on the Fred Schepsi film The Devil's Playground for the Australian Screen Classics Series (2003 Currency Press), as well as having his short stories, essays and criticism published in a range of magazines and journals.
Dead Europe is his third novel.
Since 1998, Christos has also worked as a playwright.
His first play was the AWGIE award-winning collaboration, Who's Afraid of the Working Class? (co-written with Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeve and Irini Vela) for Melbourne Workers Theatre and has subsequently worked with the same team on the play Fever (2002 Melb. Workers Theatre). His other plays include Elektra AD, Viewing Blue Poles and Dead Caucasians. His latest play, Non Parlo di Salo, about the controversial Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film co-written with Spiro Economopoulos will be staged by Melbourne Workers Theatre in July, 2005.
Spiro and Christos have also directed the short film Thug, and Christos has written the award-winning short film Saturn's Return which was based on his original short story (directed by Wenona Byrne).
Christos collaborated with the photographer Zoe Ali on three public art exhibitions called Destination Unknown 1, 2 & 3 about the themes of refuge, migration, exile and alienation.
Christos currently works part-time as a vet nurse, tries to write full time and lives with his partner Wayne in Melbourne.
Dead Europe
by Christos Tsiolkas June 2005, $22.95.
An unsettling, brilliant novel about the truths and lies of mythology and history from the acclaimed author of Loaded.
‘Dead Europe sets sharp realism against folktale and fable, a world of hauntings and curses against a fiercely political portrait of a society. The energy in the writing, the pure fire in the narrative voice and the fearlessness of the tone establishes Christos Tsiolkas in the first rank of contemporary novelists.’ Colm Tóibín, author of The Master
Two stories intertwine to a shocking end…
After the opening of his photography exhibition in Athens, Australian photographer Isaac travels through post-communist Europe.
It’s the time of a united currency, illegal immigration and of an encroaching globalised homogenous culture. Social disintegration and poverty surround him as the East struggles to merge with the West.
Isaac dives deep into the squalor finding confusion, power, prejudice and adrenalin.
His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father’s stories, the Europe at the centre of civilisation and culture.
But behind the façade of a unified contemporary society, he finds a history-blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past.
In the mountain village in the Balkans where his mother was born, he unearths ancient terrors that have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never can be.
Continuing his journey across Italy, eastern Europe and Britain, Isaac discovers that ghostly images keep appearing in the photographs he takes, providing clues to a family secret and tragedy.
Alongside Isaac’s story the reader is taken to World War II Greece. A peasant family is asked to provide protection to a Jewish boy fleeing the Germans. It is this abused boy that releases a curse on all those who deceived him.
From the mountains of Greece to the streets of 1960’s Melbourne and today’s Europe, we trace the journey of this malevolent force as it feeds on generation after generation of Isaac’s ancestors.
Part long-forgotten myth, part meditation on the violence and tragedy of European contemporary history, Dead Europe is an unsettling ghost story about blood lust, blood libel and blood revenge; a novel of blazing brilliance about the truths and lies of mythology and history from the acclaimed author of Loaded.
FROM CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS:
‘In attempting to trace back through the mythologies, lies and truths of history, I want to examine how the legacies of the past still actively disturb our sleep in the present.
'Isaac’s story is written in a contemporary idiom, in the first person, as he reflects on his alienation from Europe, on what it means to be an artist, to be a man in love, to be an ethical human in a supposedly post-ideological age...
'I am also attempting to understand the longest standing of all European racial legacies: anti-Semitism.
