Vitali Vitaliev

2 days ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Vitali Vitaliev

As a writer and a bibliophile, I welcome the quickly multiplying “books’ sarcophagi” that have spread through the streets of British villages and towns. I love these impromptu mini-libraries inside the used red phone boxes. Why “sarcophagi”?

1 month ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Vitali Vitaliev

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, published in Moscow in the 1930s, is one of the few mementos of my first, Soviet life that has miraculously survived my wanderings. I received it as a birthday present at the age of five, and this battered and dog-eared—yet still perusable—folio now adorns a bookshelf in my garden office. As a child, I used to leaf through its glossy pages in bed when suffering with cold or flu or, more likely, faking them and playing truant.

1 month ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Vitali Vitaliev

The other night I dreamed of my native city of Kharkiv—bustling, sunlit and utterly peaceful. I was walking along the embankment of the unnaturally wide and glistening river when, suddenly, my mobile phone rang. The face of my mother, who passed away in Australia in 2006, appeared on its screen. I heard her voice asking me to come home, and realised with horror that I could not remember where home was.

Mar 28, 2025 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Vitali Vitaliev

On the way to the train station of a morning, I often stop for a cuppa at one of the several coffee shops on the High Street of our small Hertfordshire town. From there, I have a great view of a plush funeral parlour, with an opulent flower-decorated coffin in the window, right next door to a much more plain-looking Holland & Barrett health food shop. It’s a good place to ponder life’s futility and get depressed. There’s nowhere you can hide from funeral parlours in our town.

Feb 7, 2025 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Vitali Vitaliev

I have always found shopping for food in France an almost sensuous delight, particularly when buying fruit and vegetables. I don’t know how they manage to make their salad leaves so bright-green and their tomatoes so unabashedly red. While on holiday in Normandy last summer, I couldn’t tear my gaze away from a graceful plywood basket of tomatoes in a huge hangar-like Carrefour supermarket.