German voice of Ukraine
Katja Petrowskaja, born in Kiev, winner of the Bachmann Prize, is currently much sought after for interviews.
At the moment, her native Kiev is often in the news, and as a result Katja Petrowskaja is much sought after for interviews. Although now based in Berlin, the writer concerns herself closely with events in the Ukraine, which she still visits often. Yet her approach to her home country and the region tends to be more literary than political in nature. In 2013, she won the coveted Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her book Vielleicht Esther, the story of an older woman in Kiev during the Nazi occupation – and became the face of the Ukraine in the German media.
Petrowskaja was born in 1970, graduated in literary and Slavonic studies in Tartu, Estonia, and gained a PhD in Moscow. She has lived in Berlin since 1999. She did not learn German until she was in her mid-twenties, but it has become the language in which the author and journalist has tended to write ever since. For her, German has been “a bit of a liberation” and it was this new medium that gave her the necessary distance to the material of her stories. A successful concept: the literature pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily have celebrated Petrowskaja as a “gift to literature”, and the weekly Die Zeit describes hers as an “intelligent, flamboyant and highly unique voice.”
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