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AUST RIA
Winning author
Paulus Hochgatterer
Book awarded
Die Suesse des Lebens (2006)
The Sweetness of Life
Publishing house
Deuticke Verlag
Biography
Paulus Hochgatterer, born in 1961, lives as a writer and child therapist in Vienna. He has received various literary prizes and commendations, most recently the Elias Canetti Stipend of the town of Vienna, and is the author of several novels and story collections.
Synopsis
This novel takes us through the lives of a group of damaged people living in a pleasant and seemingly tranquil Austrian village. It’s a village where nothing dramatic occurs, until one Christmas…
It’s the Christmas holiday, the presents have been opened, and a six-year-old girl is drinking cocoa and playing Ludo with her grandfather when the doorbell rings. Her grandfather goes to the door, talks to someone there, gets his coat, and goes out.
When her grandfather doesn’t come back, the little girl puts on her new green quilted jacket with a squirrel on it and goes out to find him. She follows some footprints and finds her grandfather’s body on the ramp that leads to their barn. There is no doubt it is his body - the clothes are his - but his head has been crushed to a bloody pulp. The little girl goes home and says nothing for the next few days.
However, the body is discovered the morning after the murder, and detective superintendent Ludwig Kovacs - a middle-aged divorcé who loves gazing at the stars, has a daughter he can’t communicate with and is beginning a new relationship with a local woman - has to solve this case and the spate of animal killings - chickens, ducks, hamsters and 16 hives’ worth of bees - which follow.
On a basic level, this novel is about a horrific crime and the investigation which follows. But it’s really about far more than this. It’s about harming children through trauma, violence and cruelty, and it’s about the pain that parents and elders can cause. Hochgatterer pulls back the veil of normality and reveals the part of life going on beneath the surface.
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 CROATIA
Winning author
Mila Pavicevic
Book awarded
Djevojcica od leda i druge bajke (2006)
Ice girl and other fairy tales
Publishing house
Naklada Boskovic
Biography
Mila Pavicevic was born in Dubrovnik on the 4 July 1988. She reads Comparative literature and Greek language and literature at the Zagreb University. She received several literary awards for young writers in Croatia.
Synopsis
The book, entitled Ice girl and other fairy tales and consisting of 13 stories, is a clever combination of the miraculous and supernatural intertwined with the real. It’s written in such a way that there is no obvious separation or contrast between the real and the invented, between possible and impossible.
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FRAN CE
Winning author
Emmanuelle Pagano
Book awarded
Les Adolescents troglodytes (2007)
The Cave teenagers
Publishing house
Editions P.O.L, Paris
Biography
Emmanuelle Pagano was born in Aveyron in September 1969. Today she lives in Ardèche, with her three children, born in April 1991, September 1995 and May 2003. She graduated in Fine Arts, and has conducted university research in the field of aesthetics in film and multimedia.
Synopsis
Adèle, the narrator and main protagonist of The Cave teenagers, was born with a male body but subsequently underwent surgery to become the woman she now is. The story relates how she returns to her home region and takes a job driving the local school bus. Two lakes are mentioned in the extract. One is an artificial lake under which now lies the farm where Adèle was born and spent her childhood, with her parents and her brother Axel. The other is a natural, volcanic lake where she often goes to spend time on her own. It is beside this lake that the extract opens.
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HU NGARY
Winning author
Szécsi Noémi
Book awarded
Kommunista Monte Cristo (2006)
Communist Monte Cristo
Publishing house
Tericum, Budapest
Biography
Noémi Szécsi (1976), is a writer and a translator. She graduated with a degree in Finnish and English in Budapest, and studied cultural anthropology in Helsinki. She published her first novel, Finno-Ugrian Vampire in 2002, which was reprinted in 2003 as a result to its success. The script based on the novel was short-listed by the workshop of the Sundance Institute. Besides being a historical novel and a saga of a family, Communist Monte Cristo is an artistic interpretation of the history of a communist idea in Hungary based on elaborate research.
Synopsis
It is late July, 1919’. Sanyi, a handsome vegetarian butcher and an assistant labourer of the Communist Party, sets out for Vienna to carry out a secret mission. He has the destiny of the proletarian revolution in his hands. But the revolution soon fails and from that moment on all of his activity becomes illegal. The dramatic changes set in motion a bloody comedy complete with strange disguises and false identities.
But once a liar always a liar. Sanyi had nothing left but his syphilis after the failure of the proletarian revolution. However, he starts again, building a new life with a wife, a daughter and two sons, but keeping secret his real communist self even from his own family. Despite all the differences within this right-wing family, by 1945 Sanyi’s only aim was to keep them alive.
Gingerly maneuvering through the world of politics, he survives the bloody decades of Hungarian history up until 1956. Although, after almost 40 years of devotion to the Communist cause, Sanyi starts to have his doubts and with good reason…
The novel turns the elements of the original Monte Cristo story upside down, for it is not a tale about revenge but about political stupidity.’
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IR ELAND
Winning author
Karen Gillece
Book awarded
Longshore Drift (2006)
Dérive littorale
Publishing house
Hachette, Dublin
Biography
Karen Gillece was born in Dublin in 1974. She studied Law at University College Dublin and worked for several years in the telecommunications industry before turning to writing full-time. She was short listed for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award in 2001, and her short stories have been widely published in literary journals and magazines. Longshore Drift has been translated into German, and is published by Verlagsgruppe Random House. Seven Nights in Zaragoza has been translated into German and published by Verlagsgruppe Random House and Bertelsmann Books. It has also been translated into Dutch and published by de Boekerij, and is currently being translated into Danish. It is due for publication this year by Forlaget Arvids. The Absent Wife is currently being translated into Albanian and is due for publication in 2010 by Dudaj Publishing.
Synopsis
In the blink of an eye, in a busy Brazilian marketplace, a small boy disappears without a trace... His mother’s free-living existence, travelling South America with her lover and son, comes to a sudden, brutal end. Two years later, broken from searching for her missing son, Nacio, and desolate at her lover’s departure, Lara returns to her childhood home on the southwest coast of Ireland. As she struggles to come to terms with her loss, Lara once again befriends Christy, her childhood sweetheart, who finds himself increasingly drawn to her bohemian nature. But what starts as an interest in her past grows into an obsession. As Lara tries to piece her life back together, never losing hope for Nacio, Christy begins to fall apart. Longshore Drift is a tale of passion and betrayal, of the consequences of searching for love in all the wrong places, and of a heartbroken mother’s unswerving conviction that her child will be returned to her - even when all hope seems to be gone.
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ITAL Y
Winning author
Daniele Del Giudice
Book awarded
Orizzonte mobile (2009)
Movable Horizon
Publishing house
Giulio Einaudi editore
Biography
Daniele Del Giudice was born in Rome in 1949. He lives in Venice, where he teaches at the Theatre Faculty of the IUAV, the University Institute of Architecture. Daniele del Giudice’s books have won the following awards: the Viareggio Prize in 1983; the 1995 Bagutta Prize; the Selezione Campiello Prize in 1995 and 1997; and the Accademia dei Lincei award for fiction in 2002. Del Giudice has also published essays on I. Svevo, T. Bernhardt, R. L. Stevenson and Primo Levi.
Synopsis
As he narrates his own Antarctic expedition, Daniele Del Giudice recalls the notebooks of other courageous expeditions that are unknown to most, with shipwrecks, ships stuck for months behind ice, savage crews and sailors on the brink of desperation or annihilated by madness. These are the last true adventure writers who have created the myth and the memory of the Unknown Land, and possess an often tragic and emblematic fate as they are pushed to their limits.
Del Giudice travels to the ‘deepest and furthest’ parts of South Antarctica. From Santiago to Punta Arenas in Chile, and further down, until, ‘feeling embarrassed and impeccably Martian’, he reaches ‘another planet, a celestial body inhabited by millions of penguins’. Exploring the area, he finds stored in its ice the history of what has lived there and those who have sought to reach it.
With a work of storytelling marquetry, a patchwork of life and literature, the author reconstructs a ‘hyperexpedition’ that connects the explorers’ past trips and retraces their paths through the world alongside those contained in literature. Playing on the diversity of these different perspectives and voices, the author presents a ‘movable horizon’ in space and time, but one which is stable and long-lasting in the feelings it provokes.
This is a trip beyond all sense of time, set in a hypnotising landscape, indifferent to man but with a sublime beauty: from the yellow ochre of the plains to the glaciers that drip in the water, among rocky peaks, eternal snow, precipices and a horizon of ice and light.
They are places, stories, days, years and geological eras that defy simple linear narration. It’s a natural ancient landscape that stratifies everything and crystallises every memory. This book is the poem of these simultaneous worlds.
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LITH UANIA
Winning author
Laura Sintija Cerniauskaité
Book awarded
Kvėpavimas ¡ marmurą (2006)
Breathing into Marble
Publishing house
Alma Littera
Biography
Prose writer, playwright. She was born in Vilnius (1976). In 1996, she enrolled in Vilnius University’s Department of Extramural Studies to study Lithuanian language and literature. She worked as a freelance publicist for the magazine Malonumas (1998-1999); as a language editor for Genys, a children’s magazine (2000); and as a journalist for Tavo vaikas (2001-2002). In 1993, she won the Republic competition of young philologists, and the next year the First Book competition granted by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. In 2001, her play Liberate the Golden Foal (Islaisvink auksin¡ kumeliuką) was the winner of the competition organized by The Fairies Theatre and Vilnius University. In 2003, Liučė Skates (Liučė čiuožia) a prose and plays selection, ranks among the 12 best books of the year, and her play Liučė Skates is staged by the National Youth theatre. In 2004, Liučė Skates (Liučė Čiuožia) won first prize in the Berlin international play fair Theatretrefen.
Synopsis
Breathing into Marble is the fourth book by this young and talented writer. But it is her first novel, a well-crafted drama about painful solitude, family, and relationships between men and women. Černiauskaitė writes about yearning, about unused intimacy, about the gentleness and burdens of the heart, about life, about something from below and something from above. This is the story of a young mother named Isabelle and her young family, which adopts a six-year-old boy who is unable to put down roots in his new family and kills his ill adopted brother. It’s a romantic ballad with the plot of a thriller. It’s a deep psychological analysis of a mother’s soul. It’s a book full of so many strong emotions that it is almost possible to feel the characters breathing down your back while you read it.
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NOR WAY
Winning author
Carl Frode Tiller
Book awarded
Innsirkling (2007)
Encirclement
Publishing house
Aschehoug
Biography
Carl Frode Tiller (born January 4, 1970 in Namsos) is an author, historian and musician. His works are in Nynorsk (lit. ‘New Norwegian’), one of the two official Norwegian standard languages. Tiller debuted in 2001 with the novel Skråninga (Downward Slope), which was recognized as the best initial work of the year with the Tarjei Vesaas’ Debut Prize. Downward Slope was nominated for the Brageprisen (the Brage Prize is a juried award). In November 2007, Tiller was awarded the Brageprisen for his novel Innsirkling (Encirclement). In the fall of 2007, Innsirkling received the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and was nominated for the premiere Scandinavian literature prize, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize.
Synopsis
Encirclement is a novel that covers a broad and deep spectrum, both psychologically and sociologically. The novel is cleverly composed – it changes easily between different narrators and points of view, as well as using letter form, dialogue and inner monologue.
David can not remember who he is. A notice in the newspaper encourages acquaintances and friends to write him letters so he can start remembering. The letters create a network of texts where the lives of David, the writers, and others, are rewritten and reassessed.
The letters were written in 2006, but concentrate on the past. This way, false perspectives are created, whether they focus on adolescent dreams, the ambitions of artists, or people’s plans for the future. It’s a story about what happened to one generation of Norwegians, about gender roles and the search for popularity and identity. It’s also about questions of what is a life and how is a life story created under the influence of other people’s stories?
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POLA ND
Winning author
Jacek Dukaj
Book awarded
LÓD (2007)
ICE
Publishing house
Wydawnictwo Literackie
Biography
Jacek Dukaj (born in 1974) is one of Poland’s most interesting contemporary prose writers, whose books are always eagerly anticipated events. Dukaj studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University. He successfully debuted at the age of 16 with a short story Zlota Galera (Golden Galley). He is known for the complexity of his books, and it is often said that a single short story of Dukaj contains more ideas than many other writers put into their books in their lifetime. Popular themes in his works include the technological singularity,nanotechnology and virtual reality, and because of this his books often can be classified as hard science fiction.
Synopsis
The story takes place in an alternate universe where the First World War never occurred and Poland is still under Russian rule. Following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered parts of Siberia in Russia and started expanding outwards, reaching Warsaw. The appearance of Ice results in an extreme drop in temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost - a peculiar form of being which appears to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (cold iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and new industrial empires. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from the many-valued logic of ‘Summer’ to the two-valued logic of ‘Winter’ with no intermediate steps between True and False.
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PO RTUGAL
Winning author
Dulce Maria Cardoso
Book awarded
Os Meus Sentimentos (2005)
Les Anges, Violeta
Publishing house
Asa Editores
Biography
Dulce was born in Trás-os-Montes, in 1964. She regrets the lack of memories related with her journey from Vera Cruz to Angola. From her childhood she remembers the mango tree in the backyard, the sea and the involving space that shaped her soul.
She returned to Portugal in 1975. Later, she graduated from the Law Faculty of the University of Lisbon; she wrote screenplays and spent some time with uselessness. Dulce also wrote short stories. She kept on writing and enjoying uselessness. She lives in Lisbon. Her premiere novel, Campo de Sangue, published in 2002 and written with the support of a Fund of Literary Creation, from the Portuguese Culture Ministry, was distinguished with the Grand Prize “Acontece de Romance”.
Synopsis
The night of the accident. There is a drop of water hanging from a piece of glass that refuses to fall. There is an instant that lasts an eternity.She opens a door (perhaps a paragraph) of an empty house and the mother calls for her when the father goes mad out in the yard.
Reflected in the drop, Violeta plunges into that eternity and thinks about what the last day of her life could have been like. She examines her life, and what that life consists of: the parents, the daughter, the child, the bastard. She feels the urgency of life that carries on indifferent like the road that she veered off during the accident. In her unstable position, upside down, trapped by her seat belt, it appears that everything is coming undone. Losing the obscurity that daily life presents, Violeta sinks into her past, a hallucinating spiral of transparencies and echoes.
Violeta turns a corner (or is it a page?) and the revolution of April interrupts, brandishing its anger. She opens a door (perhaps a paragraph) of an empty house and her mother calls for her when her father descends into madness out in the yard. A man chokes the desire from her body (comma, for sure) and the girl with the roller skates glides in front of the daughter who loses her life. The maid, as always, is silent.
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SLOVA KIA
Winning author
Pavol Rankov
Book awarded
Stalo sa prvého septembra (alebo inokedy) (2008)
It Happened on September the First (or whenever)
Publishing house
Kalligram
Biography
Pavol Rankov (b. 01.09.1964 Poprad, Slovakia)
Pavol Rankov is a writer of prose fiction, essayist, journalist, information scientist and university pedagogue. After completing his secondary schooling in Bratislava he studied library science at the Philosophical Faculty of Bratislava’s Comenius University (1983-1987). He worked as a methodologist in the Slovak National Library in Martin (1987-1990) and in the Slovak Pedagogic Library in Bratislava (1991-1992). Since 1993, he has worked at the Department of Library Science and Scientific Information at Comenius University in Bratislava. He participates in projects with Slovak Radio. He lives in Bratislava.
Synopsis
On September 1, 1938, at a fashionable swimming pool in Levice in the centre of Europe, three thirteen-year-old adolescents – Hungarian, Czech and Jewish – decided to compete in a swimming competition to win a claim over a Slovak blonde, Mária. The three friends’ contest for love is repeated in virtually every year of the novel’s progress, but the race never ends in victory. The novel rushes its characters onward through political tribulations, but never allows them to finish the fateful race. Even though the characters’ lives are filled with incredible events, they are never filled with the most sacred emotion of them all – love. Nobody wins Mária and Mária, the most innocent, loses all.
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SWE DEN
Winning author
Helena Henschen
Book awarded
I skuggan av ett brott (2004).
The Shadow of a Crime
Publishing house
Brombergs
Biography
Helena Henschen was born in 1940 and raised in Stockholm. She has an artistic background and has worked as a graphic designer. Henschen has both written and illustrated children’s books and she was one of the founders of the famous Swedish design company Mah-Jong.
Synopsis
The von Sydow murders got renewed attention in Sweden in 2004 as a result of the publication of the book I skuggan av ett brott [In the shadow of a crime] written by Helena Henschen, whose mother was the younger sister of Fredrik von Sydow. The book is a mixture of fact and fiction, and constitutes an attempt to understand both the total taboo that arose within the family in relation to the crime, and also why Fredrik von Sydow committed the murders. Fredrik von Sydow came from an upper-class family in Stockholm and studied Law at Uppsala University. On March 7, 1932, his father Hjalmar von Sydow, who was a conservative Member of Parliament and the managing director and chairman of the Swedish Employers’ Federation, and two maids employed in the household were found dead in the family residence in Stockholm, all bludgeoned to death by an iron bar.
Even though the police soon came to suspect the son, Fredrik, it took a few hours before they were able to locate him. Fredrik von Sydow had taken a taxi with his wife Ingun to Uppsala where they entered the restaurant of Hotel Gillet and ordered champagne, caviar and oysters. When the police eventually arrived at the restaurant, Fredrik von Sydow shot and killed his wife and himself.
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