The nominees for the 2022 European Union Prize for Literature have been announced. The award is changing this year, with the jury choosing a single overall winner rather than one from each country. There are 14 nominees this year ranging from Ukraine and Georgia to Ireland and Spain.
Among the selected writers is Slovakia’s Richard Pupala, whose short story “A Lion in the Forest” was published in B O D Y‘s Central European Short Story Issue in 2019.
The prizewinner will be announced April 21 in a ceremony at the Paris Book Fair.
Nelly Sachs in B O D Y
B O D Y’s Winter Issue includes a selection of work by Nobel Prize-winning poet Nelly Sachs from the book Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems: A Bilingual Edition. The poems are translated by Joshua Weiner and Linda B. Parshall.
Read the poems here
Sorokin on Putin
Day of the Oprichnik author Vladimir Sorokin has written a blistering and thorough unmasking of Vladimir Putin titled, “Vladimir Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power” in The Guardian, Feb 27.
The Russian writer compares Putin to the series of lone, paranoid, autocratic rulers of Russia’s past – from Ivan the Terrible, through Pyotr I through Stalin, of course, and how the absolute authority they carved out “shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue, seeming to say: ‘you are the masters of a country whose integrity can only be maintained by violence and cruelty; be as opaque as I am, as cruel and unpredictable, everything is allowed to you, you must call forth shock and awe in your population, the people must not understand you, but they must fear you.'”
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