Kristine Bilkaus novel “Peninsula” impresses “with his loud and quiet questions for our society”, it was said at the end of the almost forgotten laudation on the winning book in the fiction category. This was not the case with the novels on this spring day in the sun-drenched glass hall of the book fair: namely, that the one who wins the prize of the Leipzig Book Fair is at least critical of society and time and takes a look at the diverse crises of our presence.
Just as Bilkau did in her thank you speech, when she had been reviewed by the refugee crisis for the years since 2015: “The young generation only knows these breathless years. We owe it to teenagers and young adults, better to take care of this future and use us with everything we have, for a language of humanity and sincerity.”
Which is why the stars on the Roman Shortlist, Christian Kracht and Wolf Haas, with “Air” and “wobbly contact” should not have had any great chances: Tookist the one, too playful and nested, both too concentrated on the nature and core of the literature and too little to consider that our time is such a threatening, disruptive and possibly requesting answers.
Mother-daughter novel
Bilkaus mother-daughter novel on that peninsula in the North Frisian Wadden Sea is with all the material interestingness (including climate fiction traces) compared to conventional, linguistically formal. Nevertheless, the jury found that under this conventional surface “barter” would be “barely” and that the novel was only “apparently straightforward”. Maybe she just couldn’t agree.
In any case, the price for Bilkau fits into the picture of this award, which began to read the importance of reading and literature by the jury chairman Katrin Schumacher. As usual, it started with the translation price that Thomas Weiler, who lived in Leipzig, for his transfer of an unusual text.
Weiler also translates Bacharevič
Ales Adamowitsch, Janka Bryl and Uladsimir Kalesnik at the beginning of the 1970s, after they had talks with survivors of the Wehrmacht massacre 1970-1973 in Belarusian villages. With “Feuerdörfer” they made a polyphonic narrative and contextualized it, according to the manner of Svetlana Alexijewitsch, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for their books in 2015.
Weiler spoke of an “exciting week” in his acceptance speech. In fact, he indirectly received a lot of honor on the opening evening: he is also the translator of Alhierd Bacharevič’s novel “Europe’s dogs”, for whom Bacharevič in the Gewandhaus had received the Leipzig award for European understanding. So a lot of Belarus, a country that suffered from the Wehrmacht crimes and has been suffering from the dictatorship of his President Alexander Lukaschenko for thirty years, which is not least firmly on the side of Putin Russia.
Against this background, almost Maike Albath with her Naples book or Sandra Richter with her Rilke biography did not get the Subject Book Prize with her Naples book. But the author and cultural journalist Irina Rastorgueva, born in 1983 on the island of Sacälin in the Far East of Russia, for her “epicrise of Russian self-poisoning” entitled “Pop-up Propaganda”. In it, Rastorgueva analyzes the language and the conspiracy narrative of the Kremlin.
So very contemporary, this award, and the enlightening political commitment in book and literature forms. There were no questions unanswered at first.