Edgar Dutka: Mother Disappeared

The screenwriter, director, dramaturge and novelist Edgar Dutka presents Matka Vzala Roha (Mother Disappeared), a new collection of short stories with an autobiographical tone capturing the fate of a family marked by the Communist regime. In 1948 Dutka’s mother was arrested. The following year she was sentenced to six years in a Communist jail for people smuggling, escaped and emigrated to Australia. It was 20 years before, in 1968, she saw her son, whose childhood was spent in a children’s home and with foster parents, and 40 years before she saw her daughter. His mother’s escape from prison and from the country is the subject of the first and longest piece in Dutka’s new book. In it the recipient of the State Literature Prize loosely follows on from his U útulku 5 (At Shelter 5) (Prostor, 2003), which was nominated for a Magnesia Litera prize.