Corri van de Stege
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Corri van de Stege was born in The Netherlands where she attended secondary school before moving to England and completing a philosophy degree at University College London. She lives in rural Norfolk in the east of the UK and after a successful career in education and as a management consultant she is now a full time writer and book blogger. Half the World, a memoir of living in Iran before and during the 1979 revolution, is her debut book publication and she is currently writing a novel, Notes on Anna. She is also working on a collection of short stories that she has been writing over the years. The author is a keen traveler and with most of her family and friends living abroad there is always an excuse to take a trip somewhere.
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Half the World
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Biography / Revolution in Iran
What was it like to live in Isfahan as the foreign wife of an Iranian University professor in the run up to and during the revolution of 1979, when the Shah was overthrown and Khomeini created the Islamic Republic of Iran? Corri van de Stege, a Dutch national, lived, studied and worked in London for eight years, married her Iranian boyfriend and moved with him to Isfahan early in 1977. Initially suffering from homesickness for London she adapts and makes new friends amongst the community of ‘foreign wives’ and becomes a teacher at the British Council. But then she finds herself in the middle of a revolution in an alien country with her husband and baby son, without internet, social media or even a telephone in her house, and where television and radio broadcasts are censored so you never know what is true and what is gossip. The author evokes the stark contrast between the everyday life on the campus and the escalation of violence both across the country and in Isfahan, the town where she lives. She worries about the increasing demonstrations of hatred against foreigners, in particular Americans, and the English language. You feel the tension grow between friends and colleagues who will have to decide whether they can live in an Islamic Republic.
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Motet of Betrayal
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Short Story, General Fiction
Living in East Germany under the watchful eye of the Stasi, trust and love are suspect. Suspicion runs deep about who is watching who. When the wall comes down Bach’s Motetten, performed in the St Thomaskirche in Leipzig, form the background music to Pastor Anselm’s betrayal of the woman he once loved.
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The Price of a Teabag
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Short Story, General Fiction
Staying in Rotterdam in the middle of the winter after having lived abroad ‘for a long time’ a Dutch woman comments on what she sees around her. When she goes to Delft to meet with an old school friend in rather sad circumstances she realizes her alienation from everything and everyone living in the country of her birth and that there is no going back.
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Notes on Anna
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Contemporary fiction, women's fiction
Why is Katie so secretive and hiding the notes she is writing for her book on a girl called Anna, so that her husband Mike does not find and read them until it is too late? Katie and Mike meet in London and move to a town in Iran, where revolution is gathering pace. While living in Iran, Katie is determined to write about what she knows of life in a claustrophobic and religious community somewhere in the Netherlands but finds that, as she unravels some of the secrets of that village life, stability around them in this different and far away country collapses so that once more she needs to move away from a place she wanted to make home. |
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