The Wild Boars

The Wild Boars is a fictional story about the life of the protagonist, Ermal Bllaca. Ermal is a ten-year-old boy, living with his family in the city of Gjakova, when a Serbian police patrol swarms through their neighbourhood identifying and massacring ethnic Albanians. The mass killings of civilians were conducted across Kosovo as part of the ethnic cleansing that followed in the wake of the NATO airstrikes of March 1999. This fictional story mirrors the real life events of Dren Caka, who as a young boy fled from Serbian police along with thousands of other Albanians to neighbouring countries. I had the chance to meet Dren for the first time when as a journalist covering the plight of the refugees, I interviewed him at the military hospital where he was being treated for a bullet wound. Dren described to me how his mother and three sisters were killed by the Serbian Police. I want to thank him for being my inspiration to write The Wild Boars. I did not meet him again, even though he lives somewhere in Canada. Through my research I discovered that he had several times been called to The Hague as a witness against Slobodan Milosevic. In this novel, the fictional Ermal grows up in Canada. His father moves on with his life, but the boy is consumed by thoughts of revenge and plots to hunt down and kill Spasic, his mother’s killer. He tracks down Spasic in Serbia where he is a hunter of wild boar. The story unfolds as a plan for revenge that takes the reader from Canada to Serbia to Australia.—P.I. Kapllani

Author Biography

P.I. Kapllani is a multi-published author, who writes in English and his native Albanian language. His novel The Last Will, based on the Çamëria genocide, was published by IOWI in 2013. Beyond the Edge, a collection of short stories appeared in 2010. His play Queen Teuta of Illyria appeared in English in 2008 and the Albanian version in 2014. His writing appears in anthologies: Canadian Voices, The Literary Connection, and The Courtneypark Connection. His novella The Hunter was shortlisted by Quattro Books for The Ken Klonsky novella contest in 2015. He has published four books in Albanian. As a journalist, he was widely published in Ushtria, the Albanian Army Newspaper; Shekulli, a daily newspaper; Spekter magazine and other local media in Albania. He graduated as an Anti-Aircraft Gun Artillery Officer in 1990 from the University of Scanderbeg, and has a teaching degree in Literature and Albanian Language from Tirana University. He lives in Toronto with his wife and son. Nina Munteanu has been professionally writing and editing fiction and non-fiction for over 20 years. She teaches writing at the University of Toronto and George Brown College and has served as house editor for Eagle Publishing, Grimoire Books, and Europa SF. Cheryl has over 26 years’ experience as a professional editor and proofreader with leading publishing companies such as Maclean Hunter Printing (now part of Rogers Media) and Carswell Publishers (now Thomson Reuters), and Oxford University Press (Karachi chapter). She owned a desktop publishing business for three years, editing and publishing newsletters and magazines. In 2008, she set up In Our Words Inc., which publishes literary books. IOWI publishes an average of seven titles a year. Cheryl is the chief editor and proofreader for poetry and prose at IOWI. For enquiries and quotes on manuscript editing, please email: inourwords@bell.net