Philip O Ceallaigh on life in Bucharest

Author Philip O Ceallaigh, who was born and grew up in Ireland, has been living in Bucharest for seven years now. His first book "Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse", for which he received the 2006 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, tells stories about the Romanian capital. O Ceallaigh talks about life in Bucharest: "Bucharest is not a city that developed normally or naturally - it was forced to grow. [Nicolae] Ceausescu brought in people from the provinces, built apartment blocks for them to live in and forced them to move in... After the fall of the regime hundreds of people - most of them pensioners - were left living in these Ceausescu blocks, where I now live too. These people are aware that after working hard all their lives they now own practically nothing. For these people 1989 was followed by a period of stagnation. In my stories I asked myself how they come to terms with this absurd and hopeless situation."

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