Maria Stepanova awarded Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023

The Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 is awarded to the Russian-Jewish author Maria Stepanova, who was born in Moscow in 1972 and currently lives in exile in Germany, for her volume of poetry Girls Without Clothes. The cycles of poems – as songlike as they are narrative – impressively demonstrate how an alert awareness of history is inscribed in contemporary poetry. The volume was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in May 2022.
 

The jury statement reads as follows:

»The Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 is awarded to the Russian poet Maria Stepanova for the unconditionality with which she insists on the poetic perception of the world. Irremovably anchored in the present and in the Russian language from Alexander Pushkin to Osip Mandelstam to Marina Tsvetaeva, her work is at the same time an echo chamber of world literature in which Dante, Goethe and Walt Whitman are just as present as Ezra Pound, Inger Christensen and Anne Carson.

In the cycle ›Girls without Clothes‹ from the volume of the same name, she defends the female body against the power imbalance between observer and object. Playfully, she draws on canonic forms in the series of poems ›Clothes Without Us‹ and embeds clothing as a cipher of life into a perfect wreath of sonnets. Similar to her terrific novel In Memory of Memory, which intertwines her own family history with a retrospective view of Stalinism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Stepanova enters the realm of the dead in the cycle ›If Air‹. Her lyrical self speaks into a grave and merges with the landscape of childhood. The battlefields of the 20th century and the bones of the fallen too are stored in the deep layers.

Stepanova’s poetry, like her prose and essay writing, is a work on memory. She follows the traces of the nameless dead, unearths the untold, makes ironic sidesteps and resists any kind of slogan. Language remains her great hope, even when Maria Stepanova looks into the abyss in her poems. She helps the non-imperial part of Russia have a literary voice that deserves to be heard throughout Europe.«

The Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, awarded annually since 1994 and endowed with 20,000 euros, is one of the most important literary awards in Germany. The prize is awarded by the State of Saxony, the City of Leipzig, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels and the Leipziger Messe.

The prize ceremony will be held on April 25, 2023 at the opening of the Leipzig Book Fair. The laudatory speech will be given by the Swiss literary scholar, author and translator Ilma Rakusa.

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