Marica Bodrožić
WINNER
WINNER
Biography
Marica Bodrožić was born in 1973 in Svib, Croatia, in former Yugoslavia. She moved to Germany at the age of ten and learned German, which she now sees as her “second mother tongue”. German also became her language for creating literature.
Bodrožić writes essays, novels, poems, and stories; works as a literary translator; teaches creative writing, among other places, in high schools and colleges; and has made a documentary film. Her novel, A Cherrywood Table, has received consistently favourable reviews from critics and readers, who called it, “a poetic work that thoroughly explores memory and remembrance.”
Borodžić, who lives in Berlin, has received many prizes and awards, including the Hermann Lenz Award in 2001, the 2008 Initiative Prize, the 2009 Special Prize for Outstanding Emerging Artists awarded by the Bruno Heck Prize Scholarship, the 2011 Liechtenstein Prize for Literature (Poetry Section), and the 2013 LiteraTour Nord Prize.
Nominated book : Kirschholz und alte Gefühle (A Cherrywood Table)
Summary
The civil war in former Yugoslavia has robbed a young woman, Arjeta Filipo, of her homeland. When she finds some old photographs during a change of residence, she suddenly understands much of her own life story that had long seemed obscure. So Arjeta follows up once again the ruptures in her consciousness and her life—and the ruptures in the world.
Arjeta can dissociate herself from many things, but not from her grandmother’s table. Now she sits at this inherited piece of furniture in her new Berlin apartment and spreads out photographs over it that have come into her hands when she moved. Memories begin to surface, as if the cherry wood table offers up all the stories it bore witness to through the years.
There’s the besieged city, Istria, the sea of her childhood and youth, and her escapes at the beginning of the 90s that changed everything. But mostly it is about the time in Paris where she studied philosophy and started a new life in a new language—together with Arik, a painter she fell in love with against her will. Misha Weisband, an ornithologist, became her confidant, while Nadezhda, a physicist, is her closest friend. There is a secret that ties the two women together, but also separates them—a secret that only Arik knows and keeps for many years. Not until they both confront the blind spots in their inner lives do they manage to find their way to the truth.
Excerpts
Related publications
EUPL Anthology 2013
Various authors