The Woman Who Swam Against the Current

Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Christian Schüller

The Woman Who Swam Against the Current

A Russian woman is locked up in a psychiatric prison for copying and distributing letters from political prisoners. A fourteen-year-old Viennese boy picks up this story on the radio and decides to become a journalist.
He only learns how the letter writer's story continued half a century later - when, at the age of seventy-seven, she goes to Red Square to demonstrate for freedom of expression.
At the time, Christian Schüller was living in Turkey. He has worked in countries where oppression and despotism dominate everyday life. His reportages are about people who take out their powerlessness on weaker people - and about others who get themselves into great difficulties because they follow their conscience. Of those who allow themselves to be carried away by so-called strong men and of women who swim against the tide.
Christian Schüller's new book „Die Frau, die gegen den Strom schwamm“ will be published in September 2023 by Picus Verlag (232 pages, ISBN 978-3-7117-2141-9)

Christian Schüller has worked as a journalist since 1977. He was a correspondent for ORF in the USA, Latin America, the Soviet Union, Turkey and Iran. In between, he directed the ORF programme series »Am Schauplatz« with social reportages and created numerous TV documentaries.

 Tessa Szyszkowitz is a journalist and author, based in London since 2010. Before that, she was a correspondent in Moscow, Brussels and Jerusalem. She writes for Falter in Vienna and Tagesspiegel in Berlin, is curator of the Philoxenia series at the Kreisky Forum and a Distinguished Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

In collaboration with the Picus publishing house