Nomad life and writings of Inez Baranay:

„Local Time: A memoir of cities, friendships and the writing life”

Magdalena ROGUSKA

(magdaroguska@gmail.com)

Key words: transcultural literature, nomadic literature, migrant literature, memoirs

Inez Baranay is an Australian writerof Hungarian origin born in the Italian city of Naples. Her life and work were researched by an Italian scholar Arianna Dagnino, who described Baranay as a flagship example of a transcultural author. In her work „Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility” Dagnino contrasts transcultural writers with migrant writers, describing the first ones as „authors who are more connected to the transnational patterns and modes of expression of our contemporary globalized condition than to the more conventionally intended (im)migrant literature of the late twentieth century”. The paper polemicizes with such an approach to transcultural literature and proposes a broader definition of this phenomenon which does not exclude migrant writers. The analysis of the memoir of Inez Baranay serves to show it as an example of a nomadic discourse, a sub-group of transcultural literature.