ELKOST International literary agency - Lyudmila Ulitskaya receives the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize 2023

"We would like this year's Remarque Peace Prize to be understood as a sign of hope: the logic of war should not have the last word. The last word must be the language of humanity, which also unites people of hostile states. The violence of war must not silence the language of literature and art," says the chair of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize jury, Prof. Dr. Susanne Menzel-Riedl, President of the University of Osnabrück.

"That is why we hoped to invite a writer from Russia and an artist from Ukraine to Osnabrück to honor them with the Remarque Peace Prize and the special prize," adds the jury's vice chair, Osnabrück Mayor Katharina Pötter.

"We are pleased that the Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya will accept the Peace Prize and the Ukrainian draftsman Sergiy Maidukov the Special Prize, but at the same time we have to accept that as long as Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine has not ended, neither of them will be able to take a podium," Menzel-Riedl and Pötter explain. "Therefore, we will present the award to Lyudmila Yevgenyevna Ulitskaya and Sergiy Maidukov on different dates."

Every two years since 1991, the city of Osnabrück has awarded the Peace Prize named after Osnabrück-born writer Erich Maria Remarque. This year, the award will be presented for the 16th time.

For additional info, see https://friedensstadt.osnabrueck.de/en/what-we-do/erich-maria-remarque-peace-prize/award-winner/2023-ljudmila-ulitzkaja/

Sergei Prokofiev, a biography, by Igor Vishnevetsky (2009, NF)

Rights sold: Russia - Molodaya Gvardia, World English - GLAGOSLAV

“A classical composer is a mad person composing music, which is not clear to his own generation”, the brilliant Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, whose 120th birth anniversary will be marked on April 23rd, used to say. However, the date itself is Prokofiev’s imagination, as the author of his biography that was published in 2009 in the Life of Remarkable People series, Igor Vishnevetsky, who is a poet, a prose-writer and a culturologist, says.

"Officially, we celebrate Prokofiev’s birthday, which is the product of his imagination, on April 23rd, while according to the official documents, it should be celebrated on April 27th. Igor Vishnevetsky said in an interview with the Voice of Russia."

One of the old myths was that Sergei Prokofiev was a person, who was seriously interested in nothing at all in his life, except music and...

The Underground, or a Hero of Our Time, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1998)

Rights sold: France - Gallimard, Germany - Luchterhand, Greece - Kastaniotis, Italy - Jaca Book, the Netherlands - De Arbeiderspers, Norway - Cappelen Damm, Romania - POLIROM, Russia - Vagrius, Slovenia - Cankarjeva založba, Turkey - Everest

Underground chronicles, in first-person narrative, a homeless 50-something nonwriting writer’s wanderings through mental and physical corridors that he compares to life itself. Petrovich apartment-sits for residents of a dormitory-like building, drinks quite a bit, and twice commits murder. The first half of this 550-page book felt like baggy, linked, almost stream-of-consciousness stories, but the second half read like a suspenseful and emotional novel, in chapters. I got so caught up in the end that I had a strange, dazed feeling when I finished.

Makanin builds much of Underground around references to Russian literature, which Petrovich claims as a key value, though I don’t seem to recall him reading much. The title refers to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground plus Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time. Petrovich certainly is an...

Lyudmila Ulitskaya receives the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize 2023

Featured titles

Sergei Prokofiev, a biography, by Igor Vishnevetsky (2009, NF)

The Underground, or a Hero of Our Time, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1998)