Ukrainian writer Tetiana Maliarchuk has won a prestigious German-language literary award – the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis – and 25,000 euros for her debut short story in German.
“Thank you everyone for the incredible support!” Maliarchuk, 35, wrote on Facebook, posting a picture of herself smiling and holding up the glass award.
“The 2018 Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. I will never forget this crazy day. A new phase. A new me.”
The award ceremony took place on July 8 during the Festival of German-Language Literature in Klagenfurt, Austria, after three days of literary readings. Maliarchuk competed in the final round with 13 other writers.
She presented her non-published short story “Frogs in the Sea” to a seven-member jury and the public, including 300,000 people listening to a live broadcast of the event.
According to the award’s website, in her story, Maliarchuk “discusses the younger generation’s loss of interest in their elder relatives, intertwining it with the issues of social inequality, humans’ separation from nature, and xenophobia.”
A native of Ivano-Frankivsk, Maliarchuk has mainly written in Ukrainian, although her works have been translated into English, Belarusian, German, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Czech, and were critically acclaimed outside Ukraine as well. She has lived in Austria since 2011, and has been writing in German since 2014.
She received the “Kristal Vilenica” award in Slovenia in 2013 for her short story “The Woman and her Fish.”
That same year, Maliarchuk became the laureate of the Joseph Conrad-Kozhenovsky Literary Prize, granted by the Polish Institute in Kyiv. And in 2016 her novel “Oblivion” won the BBC’s “Book of the Year” award.
Her literary talent has also brought her recognition beyond the world of literature: In 2012, Ukrainian filmmaker Maxim Bujnicki shot “The Butterfly,” a movie based on Maliarchuk’s short story of the same name, which took first prize in the Ukrainian State Film Agency competition.
Maliarchuk now writes for the German national weekly newspaper Zeit Online.
