Der Literarische Salon mit Urszula Honek

Der Salon mit Anne de Marcken fällt leider aus privaten Gründen aus. Tickets behalten ihre Gültigkeit oder können zurück gegeben werden.

Rarely has a debut in Poland caused as much of a stir as the novel “White Nights” by Urszula Honek. Not only did it receive two of the most prestigious literary awards in its home country, the Conrad Prize and the Kościelski Prize. The English translation was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2024. “Capturing the intense, dream-like mood of the setting, in which the 'white nights' serve as a backdrop for the characters' inner journeys, is the special quality of this book,” the jury said in its vote: ”It is a dark, lyrical exploration of people searching for meaning and belonging in a fleeting world.” In fact, it is not so much people's life stories that Honek captures in her – their? – sleepy village in the Beskids, but rather their state of mind: friends who have known each other since school are looking for work, two of them with death in their hearts. A little girl is unwittingly helping her grandmother to die. An unmarried young woman, the only one in the nearby town to have gone to school, wants more out of life than it can offer her. All of them, struggling with existential crises, create a narrative mosaic of thirteen interwoven stories in their own voices.

Urszula Honek's slim, major village novel was published in an excellent translation by Renate Schmidgall at Suhrkamp at the end of February, and local critics are full of praise as well. “The village novel as anti-idyll has a long tradition in Polish literature,” said Nico Bleutge on Deutschlandfunk: ”But Urszula Honek succeeds admirably in drawing other lines into her narratives, an eye for details of the psyche or a play on magical moments.”