Author Maria Stepanova and translator Olga Radetzkaja receive Brücke Berlin Award for Literature and Translation 2020

Russian author Maria Stepanova and her translator Olga Radetzkaja are awarded the 2020 Brücke Berlin Award for Literature and Translation by the BHF BANK Foundation for the novel Post-Memory (original Russian title: Памяти памяти), which was published by Novoe in November 2017 and in German translation by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2018. The prize is endowed with 20.000 Euros, which are split equally between author and translator.

The jury states that:
»Maria Stepanova‘s Post-Memory is a search for traces, a ›meta novel‹ [describing] the research into the author’s extened Russian-Jewish family. It connects travel accounts and memories, combines finds from the ›library of a different, visual culture‹ with theoretical essays on trauma and memory. What she created is a great essayistic story about a century of violence, a reflection of the times, designed to initiate a dialogue with readers of today, in an epoch that is ›post-memory‹. Translator Olga Radetzkaja, who is based in Berlin, was involved in the creation of the book from the beginning. She has reproduced the novel’s rich repertoire of literary styles and nuances brilliantly, lent elasticity and sound to the author’s streams of thought and sentences in the German translation and thus given vibrancy to the work’s entirety.«

The award ceremony will be held on September 24, 2020 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. The Brücke Berlin Award for Literature and Translation is awarded biennially by the BHF BANK Foundation in cooperation with the Goethe Institute, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Hertha Müller is the prize’s patroness, the jury includes Jürgen Jakob Becker, Sabine Berking, Wilhelm Burmester, Ulrich Khuon, Patricia Klobusiczky, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann and Peter Michalzik.

With the Brücke Berlin Award for Literature and Translation the BHF BANK Foundation would like to put an emphasis on contemporary belletristic literature and drama from Middle and Eastern European countries, whose voices help shape the cultural exchange and the process of continued communication within Europe. Beyond that, it aims to honour especially the artistic achievements of literary translators, who make an essential contribution to the important mediative accomplishment.

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