I won’t be long

Vasiliki Petsa

POLIS

Shortlisted for the 2025 Literary Prize of o anagnostis, hartismag and Clepsydra Literary and Art Magazine

Liverpool, 2009: As the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy approaches, the main character of the book -among the survivors of the deadly crush- is forced to look back at the horrific moments of that day and confront his pain. Struck by the same tragedy, his then teenage pals have managed to settle into a quiet daily life, with spouses, children and stable jobs. His life, though, seems to have fallen apart – he is the memory bearer carrying this burden day after day, and cannot escape it, because “no one gets completely over one’s grief”.

So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
‘Til I thought of what I’d say
Which connection I should cut.

Peter Gabriel – “Solsbury Hill”

VASILIKI PETSA was born in Karditsa-Greece (1983). She studied Media, Culture and Society at the University of Birmingham and European Literature at the University of Oxford. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of the Peloponnese. As a fiction writer she has published the novella Thymamai (I Remember, 2011), the short stories collections Ola ta chamena (All Things Lost, 2012) and Mono to arni (Only the Lamb, 2015), a novel To dentro tis ipakois (Tree of obedience, 2018) and a study based on her Ph.D. thesis Otan grafei to molyvi (Political Violence and Memory in Greek and Italian Literatures, 2016), all from POLIS Publishers.