LEIPZIG (Germany), March 20 (NNN-Bernama-dpa) — Russian-born writer Katerina Poladjan has won the Fiction Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair for her novel “Golden Sands,” the jury announced on Thursday, reported German Press Agency (dpa).
In the just 160 pages of her fifth novel, Poladjan takes readers on a journey from Odessa via Rome to the eponymous socialist holiday resort of Golden Sands in Bulgaria.
At the heart of the story is Eli, a director who reflects on his life whilst lying on the couch of a “Dottoressa,” an enigmatic analyst. A history of the 20th century and its upheavals in Europe unfolds through dialogues that are at times absurd.
“Katerina Poladjan masterfully demonstrates how a biography emerges from self-questioning and invention, from storytelling and the circumvention of pain,” the jury explained in a statement.
It also praised the author’s language, describing it as both light and profound.
Poladjan knows the places featuring in “Golden Sands” from her own experience.
The writer emigrated with her family from the Soviet Union to the West as a child in the late 1970s, living first in Rome and later in Germany.
Her grandmother did not come with them at the time, Poladjan explained. “And since there was no independent tourism in the Soviet Union, we always had to meet very secretly at Golden Sands in Bulgaria.”
Poladjan travelled back to Golden Sands to research the novel, finding that the brutalist hotels dating back the socialist era had been demolished in the turbo-capitalist chaos of the 1990s and replaced by garishly colourful buildings.
“And that, in turn, is now crumbling too,” the author explains. “And for me, that was also a question – purely on an architectural level: what vision of the future do we actually still have?”
— NNN-BERNAMA-DPA