Compass Conversations: Gideon DeFoe - "An Atlas of Extinct Countries" - Srikanth Reddy

We are thrilled to present the second event in our virtual Compass Conversations series, which celebrates international non-fiction published by Europa Compass. Join us as Gideon Defoe discusses An Atlas of Extinct Countries with Srikanth Reddy.

Presented in partnership with Europa Compass. Learn more about our Compass Conversations series here. 

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About the book: “Countries are just daft stories we tell each other. They’re all equally implausible once you get up close.” Countries die. Sometimes it’s murder, sometimes it’s by accident, and sometimes it’s because they were so ludicrous they didn’t deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either ‘got too greedy’ or ‘Napoleon turned up’. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence. This is an atlas of 48 nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. This book refuses to do so, because these dead nations are so full of schemers, racists, and con men that it’s impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff. Because of this – and because treating nation-states with too much reverence is the entire problem with pretty much everything – these accounts are not concerned with adding to the earnest flag saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags might be.

About the author: Gideon Defoe is the author of The Pirates! book series and wrote the screenplay for the Oscar nominated Aardman film The Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists. He has written about how animals have sex and penned a computer game tie-in novel for Gollancz. He does film development work with Locksmith Animation and Studio Canal, and is developing a sitcom with BBC studios.

About the interlocutor: Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, Poetry, and numerous other venues. The recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Reddy is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he edits the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.