And the Winners Are...

It's no surprise that Esther Kinsky was among the favorites to win the prize for literature at the Leipzig Book Fair. But you may not have know that there were two more winners presented at the awards ceremony on Thursday.
Karl Schlögel won in the category non-fiction/essay for Das sowjetische Jahrhundert [The Soviet Decade]. At over 900 pages, it is quite a load, but not a slog. The panorama offered offers a clear narrative overview while also delving into details in a style remeniscent of Timothy Snyder, but also Walter Benjamin. The award is well-deserved

In the category of translation (into German), the translation duo Sabine Stöhr und Juri Durkot won for Internat by the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan. This very current novel takes place in 2015 in the embattled Ukrainian region of Donbas. A young teacher named Pascha has to cross the front line to visit his nephew in a boarding school on the other side of the city. Stöhr and Durkot, who have translated several of Zhadan's books into German, were praised by the jury for their sensitive rendering of Zhadan's language.

As predicted a couple days before in this blog, Esther Kinsky was honored with the fiction prize. The jury praised the contrast between the reduced, minimalist narrative and the hyper-intense depiction of the slightest details and recommended a slow, patient enjoyment of the book. Esther Kinsky might not have written a book for everyone, but it achieves an entry point to a world that is rare and seldom encountered elsewhere.