The author Barbi Markovic has won this year’s fiction prize at the Leipzig Book Fair. In her book “Minihorror” she tells about everyday horror scenarios in the life of a couple in Austria.
This year’s Leipzig Book Fair prize in the fiction category goes to Barbi Markovic. The Serbian-born author received an award for her book “Minihorror”. It’s about the couple Mini and Miki, who immerse themselves in the everyday horror of urban and migrant life in Austria.
The jury praised the book’s “funny and seemingly simple sentences that measure the absurd height of the fall between everyday life and the existential world situation.” Markovic talks about our present in an “adorably funny and bitterly serious way – war crimes at the back, climate change at the front, and in between the banality of our everyday lives.” It reveals the uncanny nature of every situation, no matter how harmless, the horror in everyday life, the horror of one’s own family.
It went on to say that the author tells a comic in prose with a confident style and conscious breaks in style. Here irony escalates into satire. The Yugoslavia war of the 1990s and its consequences formed the background.
Five books nominated in each category
Markovic was born in Belgrade in 1980, later studied German and has lived in Vienna since 2006. In 2023 she was awarded the Berlin Art Prize for Literature. Your book was published by Residenzverlag.
The Leipzig Book Fair prize, awarded in the three categories of fiction, non-fiction and translation, is endowed with a total of 60,000 euros. A total of 15 books were nominated, i.e. five in each category.
Non-fiction prize for Tom Holert
The Berlin art historian Tom Holert was honored in the non-fiction/essay category. His book “‘ca. 1972’ Violence – Environment – Identity – Method” focuses on the period after the revolutionary euphoria of 1968. The author works with text and images. Holert was born in Hamburg in 1962 and taught at the Free University of Berlin, among other places.
Ki-Hyang Lee won in the translation category. She translated “The Curse of the Rabbit” by Bora Chung from Korean. The book is made up of ten short stories. The award winner was born in Seoul in 1967 and lives in Munich.
The book fair has awarded the prizes for the 20th time this year. According to the organizers, 486 new releases from 177 publishers were submitted and viewed by a seven-person jury.