Angelus award semi-finalists

The 14 semi-finalists for the Angelus Central European Literature Award have been announced, including works by writers such as Andrzej Stasiuk, Jenny Erpenbeck and Ismail Kadare. The award is for a Central European novel published in Poland and will be presented to the chosen winner at a mysterious future date in the Polish city of Wrocław.

Last year the winner was Hungarian novelist György Spiró.  Literalab ran a pair of interviews with the Angelus award winning writer where he discusses his close relationship with Polish language and culture as well as about Central European writers.

I cannot say I recognize many of the names that didn’t make the cut from the longlist – except for previous Angelus winner Petér Esterházy, Tomas Venclova and Czech Peter Sís. Meanwhile the competition website deserves to be nominated for the Worst Central European Literary Award website. The English and German pages go no further than the seven nominees for the 2009 award while the Russian translator appears to have given up a year earlier.

Other semi-finalists for the 2011 award include: Swietłana Aleksijewicz, Natalka Babina, Drago Jančar, Radosław Kobierski, Eduard Koczergin, Kazimierz Kutz, Maria Matios, Eustachy Rylski, Witold Szabłowski, Mariusz Szczygieł and Wojciech Tochman.

Photo – M. Koch (from the aforementioned Angelus site without any caption. We can only hope it is not the voting process).