Photo Credit : Julia Schwarzinger
Tanja Maljartschuk
(Таня Малярчук, Tetiana Maliarchuk)
Tanja was born and raised in Ivano-Frankivsk and emigrated to Austria in 2011, after living for a number of years in Kyiv. Tanja is the author of five collections of short prose, two novels, a young adult novel, and a forthcoming poetry collection in Ukrainian. Her work has been translated into over ten languages and is widely available in German. She is a winner of the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize (Poland and Ukraine) and the Kristal Vilencia Award (Slovenia). In 2016 Tanja won the BBC Book of the Year Award (Ukraine) for her novel Forgottenness, after previously being a two-time finalist for this award for the novel A Biography of a Chance Miracle and the collection Downwards from Above. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from various German, Austrian, and Polish arts foundations, as well as the Federal Chancellery of Austria. Though Tanja continues to write primarily in Ukrainian, she has also been writing creative nonfiction in German since 2014. Her first story authored in German, “Frogs in the Sea,” won her the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize at the Festival of German-Language Literature in 2018.
Born 1983 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.
Currently resides in Poland and Austria.
Forgottenness
2016 BBC Book of the Year
Written in hauntingly sparse and deliberate prose, Forgottenness chronicles the mental and emotional journey of a young Ukrainian woman searching through her nation’s past for footprints to guide her through the present. The narrator, a young author, finds her life spiraling downward through a series of progressively less successful relationships until she is teetering on the verge of psychosis. She discovers unexpected solace and companionship in the unlikely figure of Vyacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), an unsung Ukrainian social and political activist of Polish descent, whose life is artfully tied with that of the narrator throughout the book. Thought-provoking digressions concurrently tell the story of multiple generations of the narrator’s family against the historical backdrop of twentieth-century Ukraine. As the narrator grasps at sanity, she simultaneously grasps at aspects of her nation’s history to keep them from slipping into oblivion. Complex in both content and structure, Forgottenness defies a nation’s Soviet-imposed memory of rootlessness by exploring the burden of a collective memory built on fear, obedience, and forgetting.
Partial translation available.
Full German translation available.
Key words: literary fiction, biographical fiction, national identity, collective memory
Original publication: «Забуття», Old Lion Publishing, 2016
Anticipated word count: 67,000
English rights holder: Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag
Questions regarding this book may be directed to Iris Brandt, Kiepenheuer & Witsch’s Foreign Rights Director, at ibrandt@kiwi-verlag.de.
Mox Nox
2018 White Ravens International Youth Library Catalog Entry
Finalist for the 2018 BBC Children’s Book of the Year Award
Illustrated by Katya Slonova
Maljartschuk’s first children’s book, Mox Nox (from the Latin “here comes the night”) is a somber, strange, and marvelously creepy dystopian novella. Set in a time when humans have mysteriously disappeared from the earth, the now-abandoned ruins of cities are populated by a civilization of bat-like creatures, some real and some fictionalized. The young Pteropus Teresa, a fruit-eating flying foxling living in a city designed for two-legged beings, begins to question the tales told the children by the elder Night-Seers and sets out on a quest to discover the truth behind the humans’ disappearance. In a tale that eventually leads her in search of the rumored mangrove forest paradise by the distant sea, Teresa struggles with coming-of-age questions regarding identity, integrity, authority, and individuality, discovering the value of friendship and being true to oneself. A tale for both young and old, Mox Nox is a spine-tingling exploration of age-old questions in a dark and eerie world intricately devised by Maljartschuk and stunningly illustrated by Katya Slonova.
Translation sample available.
Recommended Ages: 13+ (young YA)
Key words: dystopian fiction, coming-of-age, doubt, friendship, self-confidence, bats
Original publication: «Мох Nох», Old Lion Publishing, 2018
Number of pages: 120
Anticipated word count: 21,500
English rights holder: Old Lion Publishing
