a watermelon fish and a bible proof christy lefteri

A WATERMELON FISH AND A BIBLE PROOF CHRISTY LEFTERI HOW TO

A WATERMELON FISH AND A BIBLE PROOF CHRISTY LEFTERI HOW TO

He has recently established an apiary and has been training Syrian refugees on how to keep bees in Yorkshire.Īs Afra and Nuri travel across a landscape broken by the war, they have to confront not only their own unspeakable loss and pain but a lot of danger. On the way to Europe, Nuri is comforted by knowing that his business partner and cousin Mustafa is waiting for them. However, Afra has seen so many terrible things that they have to go on a perilous journey through Greece and Turkey to start a new and uncertain life in the United Kingdom. The war destroys everything they care for and they have to flee. They live in Aleppo, a beautiful Syrian city where they are rich in friends and family until everything comes crashing down. On the other hand, her second novel is the story of a married couple forced to flee Syria which was inspired by real accounts of refugees recounted to her while she was volunteering for UNICEF in Athens.Ĭhristy Lefteri’s novel “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” is a beautiful novel about Syrian beekeeper Nuri and his artist wife Afra. The novel “A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible” takes its inspiration from the lives of her parents that lived as refugees in England. It is for this reason that she writes poignant and realistic depictions of families living in exile and how these can cause a lot of pain and trauma.

She became desperate to showcase the suffering she saw and put on paper the pain she sometimes saw in her parents’ eyes when she was growing up.Īs such, many of her novels and particularly the Beekeeper of Aleppo resonate with her sympathy for Syrian families and children. She just could not forget the stories of the families and children who had suffered a lot. When Christy Lefteri went back to the United Kingdom, she was hoping that the horror of what she had heard and seen would fade with time but it did not. It was then that she decided to head to Greece and give back by volunteering. This is when she visited Cyprus and went to the Eastern shores of the Island overlooking Syria.Ĭhristy realized how lucky she was to be safe and at peace, as compared to the horrors happening in Syria. He was forced to leave as he did not believe it was safe for him and his wife to be in the country.Īs suc,h she always felt a sense of loss but never could put a finger on it until 2016. For some reason, she intuitively knew that they left because things were not all good and happy.ĭuring the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, her father had been a commanding officer and left soon after the signing of the armistice. While her parents successfully rebuilt their lives in London, she always felt a sense of something dark in their past.Įven though her parents loved her very much and she led a very happy childhood, she always sensed that something unsettling had happened to them. Lefteri’s blockbuster work “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” was inspired by the time she spent working as a volunteer at an Athens refugee camp. Previously she was a teacher of English as a Second Language and also worked in Greece volunteering for UNICEF. Lefteri currently works at Brunel University, where she teaches creative writing. The novel has garnered critical praise from the likes of authors such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Daljit Nagra. In 2010, she published her debut work “A Watermelon, a Fish, and a Bible” but it was her second novel that made her name as an author to watch.Ĭhristy’s 2019 published work would go on to become a winner of the Aspen Words Literary Prize in 2020 and also become a bestselling title in the Sunday Times. Born in 1980, Lefteri was raised in the British capital London, which is where she has lived most of her life.

The author was born to Cyprus refugees that moved to the UK in 1974, following the invasion of the island by Turkey. Christy Lefteri is a historical and literary fiction author from the United Kingdom that is best known for the novel “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” which she published in 2019.

A watermelon fish and a bible proof christy lefteri