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Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Finalist for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing
Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, a childhood memoir of political oppression and persecution during Romania’s Ceausescu years
Serialized for radio as BBC Book of the Week
The BBC based their documentary The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom on the book
A Waterstone Book Club Choice
Cold War Conversations History Podcast
BBC Witness Interview, Living in Ceausescu’s Romania
BBC Interview Midweek
“A tenderly moving memoir. (…) [Bugan] has a sharp eye for psychological nuances, including her own as she turns from reluctant dissident’s daughter to believer in her father’s demands for political freedom. (…) Anne Frank aside, one doesn’t often read accounts of persecution from the point of view of a young girl, much less one as poignant and unsentimental as this.” The Boston Globe
“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE meets Anna Funder’s account of East German repression, STASILAND… It is a stunningly powerful piece of writing, a modern classic.” The Sunday Times
“It is a book about humanity and hope, but above all it is a book about courage… Now, over two decades later, Carmen Bugan relays their story with uncompromising candour, dignity and grace.”–Freedom Magazine
“Ultimately, the love for her country is what remains, along with the love of words on paper. This book is a celebration of the power of the written word, especially those typed on an illegal typewriter buried every night in the soil under the kitchen window. She is her father’s daughter.” Scotland on Sunday
“A powerful account.” Sunday Times ‘Must Reads’
“A heart-in-mouth account of life in Romania during Ceausescu’s tyrannical reign… Bugan’s story is harrowing, but not depressing: side by side with grim notes on austerity rations and constant fear and joyful descriptions of Bugan’s grandmother’s prune jam [and] sunflowers as big as Carmen’s head.” The Lady
“A beguiling memoir… BURYING THE TYPEWRITER can be read as a heartfelt indictment of an evil political system, but essentially it is a book touched with grace… It is the more moving and powerful for being so quiet and thoughtful and for celebrating the riches of the natural world that are always there to celebrate.” Paul Bailey, The Independent
“A superbly realised memoir of a childhood smudged out by political repression… This is a smashing book.” John Sweeney, Literary Review
“A warm and humane work… On a vastly smaller scale than Vasily Grossman’s epic LIFE AND FATE, Bugan nonetheless makes the same great point: that the right to be an individual us not the right to greed and selfishness, but the authenticity of the self and one’s own modest idiosyncrasies, which Communism was never able to deliver.” Lynda Grant, The Observer
“A beautiful, vivid memoir of growing up in Ceausescu’s Romania… a childhood idyll gradually supplanted by a growing awareness of oppression.” The Guardian
“Rather than any analysis of [Bugan’s] father’s beliefs and activities, it is the author’s mix of the naïve and the knowing to present her memory of her life as a child that indicts totalitarianism more poignantly than her father’s politics of oppression.” The Times
“An evocative memoir of the transition from innocence to bitter experience.” Financial Times
“An extraordinary memoir. Burying the Typewriter [has] a warmth that sometimes seems absent from works coming from Romania itself… it may be Bugan’s distance, literal and emotional, as a refugee ensconced in the new world (the family defected to Michigan and Bugan now lives in Switzerland), that has allowed her to describe these tortuous times with such startling warmth, perception and humanity.” Quentin Curtis, The Telegraph
“An impressive feat of narrative skill… Carmen Bugan has written a moving and truthful first-hand account of a story that cannot fail to absorb; her skill as a writer makes it an exemplary memoir as well.” Patrick McGuiness, The TLS
Foreign Translations
Carmen Bugan 