Buch Wien 24

Mircea Cărtărescu was born in Bucharest in 1956. Numerous stays abroad followed, including in Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, Florence. He is the recipient of the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding (2015), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2015), the Thomas Mann Prize, and Premio Formentor (both 2018). His most recent publications in German are the “Orbitor” trilogy (2007 to 2014), the short story collection Die schönen Fremden (2016) and Solenoid (2019) and Melancolia (2022). In 2022 he was awarded the FIL Prize for Romance Languages. He lives and works in Bucharest.

Miljana Cunta is a poet, translator and cultural manager. She has been the director of the Vilenica and Fabula literary festivals, a guest columnist for the daily newspaper Delo and a mentor for creative writing workshops for disadvantaged marginalised groups. She translates from English and Italian and is the author of three books of poetry. Her poems are available in numerous languages.

Zdravka Evtimova was born in Pernik in 1959, where she still lives today. She studied English philology in Veliko Tarnovo and St. Louis/Missouri. She travels daily by train to work as a specialist translator in a Sofia ministry. Translates novels and science fiction from American, writes short and long prose. Her books were published early on in the USA and Canada, and are now also published in Great Britain, Italy, North Macedonia, Serbia, Greece, Israel and China.

Katja Gasser, born in Klagenfurt in 1975, wrote her PhD on Ilse Aichinger and Günter Eich. From 1999-2001, she was a university lecturer at Oxford/London. Since 2008, she is the head of the literature department of ORF TV. Among her film work are productions with/about Marica Bodrožić, Friederike Mayröcker, Margaret Atwood and the Austrian author Florjan Lipuš, who writes in his mother tongue Slovene. In 2017, she was jury speaker for the German Book Prize. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Austrian State Prize for Literary Critic – the first time in the history of the award, that a TV journalist was honoured with it.

Marija Girevska, born in 1980, is a literary translator, author and theologian. She is the author of three books on English Surrealism, gothic literature, and the complex connections between James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Bible. For her Macedonian translation of Ulysses, she received the prestigious “Golden Feather” prize in 2013. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in English at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Skopje.

Miljenko Jergović, born in Sarajevo in 1966, studied philosophy and sociology at the university there. Jergović reported from besieged Sarajevo, among other places, and was also a television editor there. He has lived as a freelance writer in Zagreb since 1993 and works as a political columnist for various Croatian and international newspapers.

Günter Kaindlstorfer, born in Bad Ischl in 1963, is an Austrian literary critic, TV moderator, writer, and journalist.

Nikola Madžirov, born in Strumica in 1973, is one of North Macedonia’s most renowned poets. He publishes poems, essays and literary translations and is one of the coordinators of the international network Lyrikline. His works have been translated into forty languages. Compositions based on his poems have been written by the Italian composer Angelo Inglese and the American jazz musician Oliver Lake. Nikola Madžirov was awarded the Hubert Burda Prize for his poetry collection Преместен камен (Versetzter Stein; Hanser, 2007). Numerous other international prizes and scholarships emphasise the importance of his work.

Tanja Maljartschuk, from Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine, studied philology at the University of Ivano-Frankivsk and worked as a journalist in Kyiv after graduating. Her collection of stories Neunprozentiger Haushaltsessig was published in German in 2009, her novel Biografie eines zufälligen Wunders in 2013, Von Hasen und anderen Europäern in 2014 and her novel Blauwal der Erinnerung in 2019. In 2018, Tanja Maljartschuk was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. The author regularly writes columns and lives in Vienna. The essay collection Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) was published in 2022.

Petra Nagenkögel is an Austrian author. Nagenkögel studied German, history, and philosophy in Salzburg. Since 1996, she is director of the literary association prolit at the Literaturhaus Salzburg.

Robert Perišić studied Croatian language and literature at the University of Zagreb. Since the 1990s, he has published poetry, short stories, plays and reviews in various Croatian magazines. His novel Our Man in Iraq, a bestseller in his home country in 2007, has been translated into numerous languages. It received outstanding reviews in the American ‘New Yorker’ and the British ‘Guardian’, among others. The English edition of his second novel, No-Signal Area, was published in 2020. To date, Perišić has published two short stories in German in the anthology Kein Gott in Susedgrad (2008), followed by the short story collection Horror und hohe Unkosten in 2024.

Ronald Pohl, born in Vienna in 1965, is a cultural journalist, theatre critic and author from Austria. His 2017 novel Kind aus Blau is a fictionalised biography of Miles Davis.

Image credits: Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Wien/Creative Commons 3.0

Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihać. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, Šehić studied Veterinary Medicine in Zagreb. After the war he studied literature. The literary critics regard him as the voice of the so-called mangled generation. His debut novel Knjiga o Uni (2011; tr: Quiet Flows the Una) was awarded the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011, and the European Union Prize for Literature 2013.  Selected poems, Abzeichen aus Fleisch (2011, Edition Korrespondezen) and short stories Uhrwerkgeschichten (2021, Mimesis Verlag) are translated into German.

Alexander Sitzmann was born in Stuttgart in 1974. He studied Scandinavian and Slavic Studies in Vienna and now teaches and does research at the university there. Since 1999 he has been working as a freelance literary translator from Bulgarian, Macedonian and the Scandinavian languages. Sitzmann is editor of several anthologies, volumes, and special journal issues focussed on specific themes. He is the recipient of the 2004 Honorary Prize of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, the 2016 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation, and the 2020 Brücke Berlin Theatre Award.

Silvia Stecher, born in Graz in 1984, studied German and Slavic studies. She works as an editor as well as a literary translator from the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Literaturförderungspreis of the city of Graz. Since 2022, she is a member of the editing collective der/die/das Joghurt.

Annemarie Türk, born in 1953 in Klagenfurt, studied history, political science and Slovenian language as well as cultural management and sponsoring. From 1992 to 2013, she was head of cultural promotion and sponsorship at KulturKontakt Austria and was responsible for cultural cooperation with and in 15 countries in Eastern and Southeast Europe. Since April 2013 she has been working as a freelance curator and lecturer for various educational institutions, cultural organisations and universities.

László Végel, born in 1941 in Srbobran/Sentomaš, studied Hungarian Language and Literary Sciences in Novi Sad and Philosophy in Belgrade. With Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma and Ottó Tolnai he is one of the great authors of Vojvodina. Végel published his first novel in 1967: the novel Egy makró emlékiratai [Memoirs of a Pimp] was, according to Péter Esterházy, “a milestone for modern Hungarian literature”. Since then, several novels, plays and volumes of essays have followed. They have been translated into several European languages. László Végel lives as a member of the Hungarian minority in Novi Sad.

Rebekka Zeinzinger was born in 1992 in Lower Austria. She studied German, History and Comparative Literature in Vienna and Geneva. In addition, she completed several internships in different publishing houses and worked for several museums. After completing her studies, she moved to Sarajevo where she teaches German as a Foreign Language and Austrian Literature and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy. She started translating from the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in 2019, after completing the Premuda Summer School in Literary Translation. She lives and works as a translator from the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in Vienna.