Monat: Mai 2025

The book NEAR THE WAR by Maria Galina has been awarded the Dar Prize 2025. Maria Galina has declined the award and wrote an open letter about her refusal. She also sent a statement to the jury and organizers. Both documents are published on the website of Dar Prize with a statement by Mikhail Shishkin as chairman of the jury.

These diary-like notes by Maria Galina are titled NEAR THE WAR because they are not about the war, but about the new everyday life that was caused and created by the war. They are autobiographically rooted painful descriptions of metamorphoses from Russian to Ukrainian, from life in Moscow to Odesa, from old to new communities. This book is not about the aggressors or the chaos they cause, not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about an author‘s return to her city like Odysseus has reached Ithaca again.

Aleksei Ivanov’s novel THE FOOD BLOCK is a very tricky vampire novel about a highly topical ideological conflict that runs through the entire book on many levels: Independence of thought, dreaminess, the urge for freedom and the attempt to understand our complicated world – as a counterpart to the simple answers and blunt rules that have always been and still are set up, out of laziness of thought or just to enslave people. A novel that is not only straightforward and strong like a wooden post, but also follows the rules of the genre so well, that the reader doesn‘t even notice how he has already been bitten and infected.

In Dutch language there already had been the translation of Vol. 1 of Anna Starobinets‚ children’s detective series BEASTLY CRIME CHRONICLES.  Now we are happy to have found a new and newly founded publisher who is enthousiastic about taking over and continuing with the full series.

All the heroes of this book series are animals, but they know how to love and hate, lie and tell the truth to their face, trust and despair, betray and save – no worse and no better than us humanoid readers. Who is friend and who is foe, who is an innocent, fluffy victim, who is a deadly female predator, who is a hostage and who is an intruder, you only find out at the end, because according to the rules of the genre, the perpet- rator always remains unknown until the very end.