RUNNING WITH PIRATES

A gorgeous and absorbing account of fathers and sons and the stories we tell ourselves and our children.

Set on the Greek island of Corfu in two absorbing narratives thirty years apart, Running with Pirates tells of a debt that can never really be repaid. Kári revisits his adventurous months on the island as a young traveller who had just been rejected by his Icelandic birth father and is looking for acceptance. Decades later, as a father and husband he returns to Corfu with his two teenage sons and begins to understand the importance of this place to who he is as a man and a parent and that the inevitable letting go of his own children lies ahead. In his sumptuous third work of non-fiction, Kári Gíslason traverses the joys and challenges of parenthood, the fearlessness of youth, and the stories we tell ourselves and our children. Kári Gíslason is a writer and an academic who lectures in Creative Writing at QUT. Kári was awarded a doctorate in 2003 for his thesis on medieval Icelandic literature. His first book, The Promise of Iceland (UQP, 2011), told the story of return journeys he's made to his birthplace. His second book was the novel The Ash Burner (UQP, 2015). He is also the co-author, with Richard Fidler, of Saga Land: The island of stories at the edge of the world (HarperCollins, 2017), which won the Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2018.