The Internationaler Literaturpreis 2024 goes to Pajtim Statovci and Stefan Moster for the novel Meine Katze Jugoslawien

Internationaler Literaturpreis 2024
Prize for Contemporary Literatures in Translation

For the novel Meine Katze Jugoslawien (Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2024) author Pajtim Statovci and translator Stefan Moster are awarded the Internationaler Literaturpreis 2024.

The winners were announced at a festive award ceremony on 5 July 2024 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).

For the sixteenth time, HKW and the foundation Elementarteilchen award the Internationaler Literaturpreis. The award of €35,000—€20,000 for the author and €15,000 for the translator—honours an outstanding work of contemporary international literature that has been translated into German for the first time. In this way, the prize recognizes both the original work and the work of translation. This dual focus makes the prize unique to Germany, building on the existing legacy of a prize that continues to expand upon an understanding of heterogeneous forms of storytelling. 

More about the prize and this year’s shortlist: hkw.de/literatureaward
Press photos: hkw.de/pressphotos

From the Jury’s Statement:

“Meine Katze Jugoslawien is an idiosyncratic novel that, while using accessible language, nonetheless bursts with all the complexities that the realm of human emotions has to offer. Alternating between a mother and her son, we follow them through various periods and situations in their lives, connected by precisely what separates them: a man’s violence, patriarchal violence.

Pajtim Statovci dares to unsettle his readers by breaking with the conventions that usually inform auto-fictional novels about migration. With masterful linguistic ease, he criss-crosses a range of timeframes and topics, deftly combining the ordinary and the surreal, the banal and the existential. Thanks to this strategy, he steers us through a very tangible experience of what could probably be described in abstract terms as transgenerational trauma. Touching at times, frequently comical, and consistently implacable.

Statovci’s restrained language has been translated into German by Stefan Moster with a simple elegance that makes it all the more impactful. His translation is smoothly fluent, both in the poetic descriptions of the cat’s perception and in the laconic and humorous passages, and testifies to a profound intimacy with the languages between which he works.

With Meine Katze Jugoslawien, Pajtim Statovci has succeeded in creating nothing less than a European novel—a novel of exile, a novel about a whole generation, a queer novel; none of those terms alone would do it justice. A literary work that readers can now enjoy in German thanks to Stefan Moster’s translation.”

—from the jury’s statement

This year, the jury members are Asal Dardan, Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Beatrice Faßbender, Khuê Phạm, Olga Radetzkaja, Cia Rinne, and Deniz Utlu.

Meine Katze Jugoslawien

By Pajtim Statovci. Translated from the Finnish by Stefan Moster
Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2024
320 pages, Hardcover with dust jacket
Price: €24
Finnish: ‎Kissani Jugoslavia
Otava, 2014

The Award Winners

Pajtim Statovci, born in 1990, is a Finnish-Kosovar author. At the age of two he moved with his parents from Kosovo to Finland, where he studied comparative literature. Statovci’s work has won multiple awards, including the Helsinki Writer of the Year Prize in 2018. He is a research associate at the University of Helsinki.

Stefan Moster, born 1964 in Mainz, is an author and translator. He was a lecturer at the universities of Munich and Helsinki and translated works by Hannu Raittila, Ilkka Remes, Kari Hotakainen, Markku Ropponen, Petri Tamminen, and Daniel Katz, amongst others, into German. He made his literary debut in 2009 with the novel Die Unmöglichkeit des vierhändigen Spiels [The impossibility of playing with four hands]. In 2022, he was awarded the Helmut M. Braem Prize; in 2018, the Martha Saalfeld Award; and in 2001, the Finnish State Award for Foreign Translators.

Partners

The Internationaler Literaturpreis is awarded by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the foundation Elementarteilchen (Hamburg).

Contact

Jan Trautmann
Lead Communications Officer
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin

T: + 49 (0) 30 397 87 157
presse@hkw.de

­­