Mardis Littéraires - Priscilla Morris : "Black Butterflies"

Experience the siege of Sarajevo through the eyes of Zora, an artist and teacher who is floundering at the midpoint of her life. Inspired by real accounts and family history, Black Butterflies is an authentic tale of disintegration, resilience and hope. Published in May 2022 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the almost-four-year assault, this is Priscilla’s debut novel.

Priscilla Morris is a British author who lives most of the year in Ireland. Born to a Yugoslav mother and English father, she grew up in London.

She wrote her debut novel Black Butterflies to understand the war that devastated her mother’s hometown from 1992-1996. The starting point was the inspirational story of her great-uncle, Bosnian landscape painter Dobrivoje Beljkašić (1923-2015).

Black Butterflies has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and the Nota Bene Prize. It was chosen as Indie Fiction Book of the Month in May 2022. It has been translated into Bosnian by Lejla Džanko (Buybook, Sarajevo, 2023) and Italian by Alba Bariffi (Neri Pozza, 2023). It’s currently being translated into Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Dutch, Arabic and Greek with more translations forthcoming. Black Butterflies will be published by Knopf in the United States and Canada in 2024.