Orient Express

“Europe is a shape-shifter. Something that can’t be relied upon from region to region, decade to decade. Half idea, half all-too-lived reality, it’s alive with the tensions of that contradiction,” writes Fiona Sampson, editor-in-chief of Orient Express.

Orient Express is a literary journal from Great Britain and the latest addition to the Eurozine network. The magazine was founded in the year 2002 aiming to give access to contemporary writing from the whole European Enlargement region, covering the Baltic States to the Balkans, and from Albania and Slovakia in the west to Belarus and the Ukraine in the east. It is a biannual 220-page paperback edited and printed in partnership
between contributing countries and the UK.

Orient Express is not a programmatic title insofar as the journal restricts itself to authors of CEE countries; the editors see it more as a metaphor for criscrossing the European continent; following the example of the glamorous rail-route but reaching beyond its initial track, seeking to bridge distance and to hyphenate differences.

In Eurozine Orient Express provides a good sample of its texts:

In Central Europe: Utopia or Reality? Drago Jancar reflects upon a tricky notion: the utopia of Central Europe is exactly how EU-bureaucrats imagine the Union.
Jaan Kaplinski layers war- and military experiences with sexuality in the prose-poem Ice and Heather: notes of a migrant. Aleksandar Prokopiev’s
Ethica Anthropofagon is a “how-to” instruction for human behaviour. Finally, Péter Zilahy elaborates on Yugoslavia before and after the war in From the last window giraffe: a picture dictionary for five and above.