The book All Lara’s Wars, as reads the title of the English translation of the book, was published by the Seven Stories Press publishing house in New York.

The reportage, which had its Polish premiere in 2015, touches upon important issues faced by the contemporary world.

We listen to the stories from Lara’s perspective. Her sons, Georgian Chechens, are setting off to Poland. It is here that Shamil and Rashid become Europeans. Afterwards, they go further to the West, where they start families. Years later, however, the European paradise begins to frighten them with its strangeness and spiritual emptiness. They are caught up in the holy war – the war of values they believe to be the greatest. That’s how they get to Syria… Lara is still fighting to get them home.

The seemingly disconnected sides of the world – the “Russian continent” with its sphere of influence and the Middle East Caliphate – turn out to be closely intertwined. Wojciech Jagielski describes how fundamentalism emerges at these crossroads.

Thanks to financial support from the Book Institute as part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme, translations of Wojciech Jagielski’s books have so far been published in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, Italy, and Slovakia.

The author of the translation, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is one of the most outstanding translators from Polish into English; she has translated, among others, Jacek Dehnel, Paweł Huelle, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Jacek Hugo-Bader, Mariusz Szczygieł, and Artur Domosławski. She is also one of the mentors of the younger generation of translators. For her merit to Polish culture, she was awarded the Gloria Artis medal in 2019 and, in 2018, the Transatlantyk Award awarded by the Book Institute.