The writer Katerina Poladjan receives this year’s Chamisso Prize/Hellerau in Dresden. With her four novels, she “brought a new, independent tone to German-language literature, hovering between history and fiction,” the award secretariat said on Wednesday.
Poladjan takes her readers on a “search for a language that discovers a trace of the future in the past”. The award honors her “great literature in the German language beyond national unity”.
Poladjan was born in Moscow in 1971, comes from an artist family of Armenian origin and has lived in Germany since 1979. She studied applied cultural studies and performing arts, was an actress and writes essays, novels and theater texts.
The Chamisso Prize has been associated with the Dresden Garden City of Hellerau as a “laboratory” of international modernity since 2019 and is awarded annually by an alliance of business and civil society.
