Hope some people out there will enjoy reading it from time to time. I started this blog to build a welcoming, tolerant and cosy home for my love of writing. Update: I now have another novel, ‘Mrs Black’, so far published only in my first language. Ebru, Simone, Luc, Ingrid, Milena, Tench, Susie, Raa, Milcho, Mercedes. About 25 of these London stories are now collected and published as a book, which, some critics have said, reads like a novel.Ī couple of those columns (on Vivi Westwood on exotic new-best-friendships) I have so far managed to translate for this blog. I remain grateful to my parents, Ikonija Nata Kneevi-Filipevi and Milovan. I have published some stories in English, and, so far, over 100 columns/stories in Montenegrin/Serbian/Croatian, from and about London, mostly from the point of view of an immy-mummy *an immigrant mother*, self-deprecating, observant, frustrated, extatic, sad and joyful, artistic, clumsy and practical. As a country suffers the growing pains of greed, Milena is caught up in the. Bright, young, beautiful, willing to take a chance, she is the embodiment of the new Eastern Europe.

The novel is called Milena & Other Social Reforms, and it is a political drama about corruption and how it infects everyone it touches. Milena thinks she has it all when she lands a job as the President's interpreter. They couldn’t understand a word of it, because that novel was first published in my first language, Montenegrin, in the region of ex-Yu, where I’m originally from. Here’s a photo of me reading from my novel to my friends, the Unwriteables.

Milena by Olja Knezevic