Love on the Road 2015 : Twelve More Tales of Love and Travel, edited by Sam Tranum and Lois Kapila is an anthology of twelve stories of love and travel – some sweet and touching, some bleak and disturbing. They offer the reader a meet-cute on the streets of Zimbabwe, a classic American road trip replayed with an elderly Jewish patient and his black orderly and an encounter between a withdrawn war veteran and his beautiful neighbour in Iran.
They follow a couple from Malawi who endure an odyssey in search of a better future in Europe, a woman in New Zealand who has to make a choice when her husband decides to become a woman, and many others. These stories are about the power of love to heal us, give us courage and make us want to be better people. They are also about its power to harm us, deluding us into submitting to control, deception and abuse.
This collection includes stories by writers from Australia, Ireland, Kenya, Malawi, New Zealand, the UK, the USA and Zimbabwe. The authors have won or been nominated for prizes and awards including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Pushcart Prize and Kenya’s National Book Week Literary Award.
Stories by Tendai Huchu, Marlene Olin, Shirley Fergenson, Nod Ghosh, Catherine McNamara, Stanley Kenani, Barry Reddin, Tendayi Bloom, Lily Mabura, Jackie Davis Martin, Alice Bingner and Gregory Wolos. Edited by Sam Tranum, an American journalist, author and editor, and Lois Kapila, a British journalist and translator. Between them, they have covered the energy business, government, politics, and human rights issues around the world. They met in the spring of 2009 and managed to overcome cultural differences fast enough to marry five months later. They lived in Kyrgyzstan, the USA and India before moving to Dublin. They started the Love on the Road competition from their kitchen in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 2012 because they needed a change from the often bleak subjects they regularly wrote about as journalists.