Shishkin Takes International Literature Award

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Scott Esposito

The Russian author Mikhail Shishkin, whom we published last year in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, has taken Germany's 2011 International Literature Award, beating out some impressive competition: they include Mathias Énard, author of the blockbuster French novel Zone; Elias Khoury; José Eduardo Agualusa; and the U.S.'s own Edwidge Danticat. His translator into English is the incomporable Marian Schwartz.

Jumping off from the award, Sign and Sight has an interview with Shishkin, where he makes some intriguing remarks about contemporary Russian literature:

Unfortunately in the course of the 20th century, Russian literature has fallen by the wayside. If you put people in a cage, they cut themselves off, and this gives rise to a form of subculture that has its own language, its own jokes, and the people lose interest in what is happening outside. The orientation towards the outside world was prohibited for years. For decades Russian literature missed out on all narrative developments in world literature. It will have to work through all of this now, catch up, before it can find its way back to independent development. But now it's time to take a step forward. Which is why I think, yes, it's important for an author to live abroad for a while. If you don't, it's like living in a house without mirrors. And you need mirrors to understand yourself.

Shishkin's contribution to Some Kind of Beautiful Signal was a chapter from an as-yet untranslated novel, called The Seizure of Izmail.

You can also read Schwartz's blog post at Two Words about the one essential resource for Russian translators.