Katerina Poladjan wins Leipzig Book Fair prize

In just 160 pages, Poladjan sends readers on a journey from Odessa via Rome to the eponymous socialist holiday resort of Golden Sands in Bulgaria. The focus of the story is the director Eli, who looks at his life on the couch of a “Dottoressa”, an enigmatic analyst. From this, a story of the 20th century and its upheavals in Europe emerges in sometimes absurd dialogues.

“Katerina Poladjan masterfully demonstrates how a biography emerges from self-questioning and invention, from fabulating and navigating pain,” said the jury, justifying the selection. She also attested to the author’s easy and at the same time profound language.

Between socialism and turbo capitalism

Poladjan knows the places she writes about in “Golden Sands” from her own experience. As a child, she and her family left the Soviet Union for the West in the late 1970s, first living in Rome and later in Germany.

Her grandmother didn’t come with her at the time, Poladjan said. “And since there was no individual tourism in the Soviet Union, we always had to meet very conspiratorially on this golden sands in Bulgaria.” She spent almost her entire vacation there.

She has now traveled back to Golden Sands to research the novel. The brutalist hotels from socialist times were demolished in the turbo-capitalist confusion of the 1990s and replaced by brightly colored buildings. “And that, in turn, is now crumbling. And that was also a question for me, purely on the architectural level: What vision of a future do we actually have?”

Poladjan was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for the second time. She was already on the shortlist in 2022 with “Zukunftsmusik”.

The Leipzig Book Fair prize is awarded in the three categories of fiction, non-fiction/essays and translations. The winners receive prize money of 15,000 euros for each category. This year, 177 publishers submitted 485 works.

In the non-fiction category, Marie-Janine Calic prevailed with her book “Balkan Odyssey, 1933–1941. Fleeing Hitler through Southeastern Europe”. In it she tells the lesser-known story of artists and cultural workers who sought and found shelter in the Balkans during the Nazi era.

The translator Manfred Gmeiner was honored for his translation of the novel “Below Living” by Gustavo Faverón Patriau from Spanish into German.

The Leipzig Book Fair runs until Sunday. Numerous authors from home and abroad can be experienced live there and at the associated reading festival “Leipzig reads”.