The Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 will be awarded to the Russian-Jewish author Maria Stepanova. The poet and essayist, born in Moscow in 1972, is currently living in exile in Germany. She receives the prize for her volume of poetry “Girls without clothes”, which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2022. The highly acclaimed translation from the Russian comes from Olga Radetzkaja.
In its justification, the jury also referred to the volume of poetry “The Body Returns Again” and the novel “After Memory”, both of which were published in 2020. The jury’s reasoning stated that Stepanova received the award “for the unconditionality with which she insists on the poetic perception of the world. Inseparably anchored in the present and in the Russian language from Alexander Pushkin to Ossip Mandelstam to Marina Tsvetaeva”. her work at the same time an echo chamber of world literature.
She intertwines family history with Stalinism and the collapse of the Soviet Union
According to the jury, in her cycle “Girls Without Clothes” from the book of poems of the same name, she protects the female body against the power imbalance between viewer and object. In the series of poems “Clothes without us” she playfully uses the canon of forms and embeds clothing as a cipher of life in a perfect wreath of sonnets.
Similar to her grandiose novel “After Memory”, which intertwines her own family history with a look back at Stalinism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stepanova enters the realm of the dead in the cycle “Are You Air?”: “Her lyrical self speaks to you Dig in and blend into the childhood landscape. In the deep layers are also the battlefields of the 20th century and the bones of the fallen.”
The prize will be awarded to Maria Stepanova at the opening of the Leipzig Book Fair on the evening of April 26, 2023 in the Gewandhaus. It has been awarded annually since 1994 and is endowed with 20,000 euros.