The members of Litprom have chosen their favourite from among eight candidates for this year’s LiBeraturpreis award – and the lucky winner is the Canadian-born author Madeleine Thien with her novel Dogs at the Perimeter (published as Flüchtige Seelen in German by Luchterhand, 2014, translated by Almuth Carstens), which held second place on Litprom’s 24th Weltempfänger best books list in the fall of 2014. Thien’s initial reaction to receiving the prize: “Thank you so very much, I’m surprised and so happy. The openness to ‘Dogs at the Perimeter’ in Germany has meant the world to me.”
Dogs at the Perimeter takes readers to the tropical jungle of Cambodia in the 1970s, tracing the memories, traumas and dreams of those who suffered under the terror of the Khmer Rouge. The Weltempfänger jury explains why it included the novel on its list of best books: “A psychologically profound and poetically told novel that intricately interweaves the present and past. And a novel that asks: am I not more than the sum of my memories?” The current issue of Literatur Nachrichten (Literature News) includes an article by Achim Stanislawski about the novel’s background.
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1974. Her parents are from Malaysia and China and immigrated to Canada in the 1960s. Already her first book, the short story collection Simple Recipes, received four Canadian literary awards, and her debut novel Certainty has been translated into 16 languages. In 2014 she was nominated for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s International Literature Award, and in January 2015 she participated in the Southeast Asia Literature Days. There, not only did her novel Dogs at the Perimeter find many new readers, but Madeleine Thien herself also made a deep impression on the event’s audience, participants and organizers alike with her serious and thoughtful manner.
The LiBeraturpreis is a public-choice award presented every year to an especially popular title by a female author from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world. Established in 1987 by the LiBeraturpreis e. V. initiative, since 2013 it has been awarded by Litprom with support from the Frankfurt Book Fair. The award winner receives a cash prize of 3,000 euros and an invitation to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The award grew out of the observation that translations of contemporary works by women writers are still extremely underrepresented in the German book market, and female voices continue to receive significantly less attention from the media – even though by now it’s virtually impossible to overhear these voices (including those of some very young authors) being raised confidently around the world. The goal of the LiBeraturpreis is to show the diversity of voices from the southern hemisphere and to ensure that these women writers are given more attention in the German-speaking world as well.
The LiBeraturpreis will be presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 17th in the Weltempfang Centre for Politics, Literature and Translation. We look forward to once again welcoming Madeleine Thien to Frankfurt!
