Serhiy Zhadan, a journey from missiles to applause

Serhiy Zhadan (Starobilsk, 1974) is a novelist, poet, punk and rock musician.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
23 October 2022 Sunday 16:50
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Serhiy Zhadan, a journey from missiles to applause

Serhiy Zhadan (Starobilsk, 1974) is a novelist, poet, punk and rock musician. He lives in bombed-out Kharkiv, Ukraine, "on the eighteenth floor of an apartment complex where you can see the Russians launching missiles from the neighboring city of Belgorod." Yesterday he received the Peace Prize from German booksellers, the most important award at the Frankfurt book fair, which has previously won names like Margaret Atwood, David Grossman, Claudio Magris, Svetlana Alexievich and Orhan Pamuk (these last two, very shortly before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature).

With applause that lasted three minutes, as in the best opera performances, the public, standing up, which packed the luminous church of San Pablo, recognized the struggle of the Ukrainian people against the Russian invasion. Zhadan – who will soon publish his novel Orphanage in the Gutenberg Galaxy – has continued to perform with his band during the war. Yesterday he recalled that, in the trenches, where he volunteers, the soldiers asked him for a refrigerator. “‘What do you need a fridge for at the front?’ I asked, bewildered. What they wanted was a vehicle with a large refrigerator, a refrigerator truck to pick up the dead. They had corpses that had been lying in the sun for more than a month, they had been put in a minibus and they could no longer breathe because of the bad smell.”

In the midst of war, Zhadan's band continues to play: on military bases, in the countryside, in modest sports arenas, in small auditoriums. “Many of the soldiers are my friends, they have been bombarded by Russian guns but they are still there, going to my concerts, smiling and joking. In his eyes the months of hell are glimpsed.

Frankfurt is a market where you buy and sell, and this time Ukrainian authors have achieved more translations than ever, eclipsing Spain as the guest country in the media. This city, famous for its financial market, becomes, during the five days of the fair, the world capital of the book trade. There is frantic talk, in the area of ​​agents, of novels, essays and film rights.

They are a curious type of merchants, because above all they tell stories, narrating the stories they carry in their bags. In addition to publishers, "buyers from television platforms (Netflix, HBO, Amazon...) have become very important, they come without advertising or granting interviews, but they leave a lot of money in the authors' accounts," explains the Agent Anna Soler-Pont. Unlike publishers, they don't look so much at the author's name but at the story, and they buy a lot of rights from unknown writers." Another important change is the sale of rights for audiobooks and a new emerging format, the audiodrama, a version of three or four hours with many voices and sound effects, compared to the only voice and the ten hours that an audiobook can last.

Some of the best-selling Spanish authors have been present, from Santiago Posteguillo to Julia Navarro, passing through Dolores Redondo, Irene Vallejo, Arturo Pérez-Reverte or Javier Cercas. Ildefonso Falcones, Sara Mesa, Marta Sanz and Lucía Lijtmaer have also achieved many translations. Jaume Cabré, Maria Barbal and Irene Solà have been the Catalans with the best figures. Tusquets has sold works by Almudena Grandes, Fernando Aramburu and Leonardo Padura to various countries and has aroused interest in Cristina Araújo, who narrates a rape in Look at that girl. In the youth field, Planeta rubs hands with the phenomenon Alice Kellen, a Valencian who has placed her romantic novels in 30 countries, including the US.

What have Spanish publishers bought? Angela Merkel's memoirs, to be published by RBA. And Tusquets has stolen the novel Tasmania by Paolo Giordano from Salamandra. Valeria Bergalli, from Minúscula, is the new editor of the French-speaking Rwandan Scholastique Mukasonga, a Nobel candidate. Anagrama boasts of the book on the key dates in the history of Frenchman Patrick Boucheron, inspired by a series on the Arte channel. Random has booked Cold Crematorium, a Holocaust memoir by Joseph Hausner, and has announced two Ukrainian titles, Zelensky's Speeches (out late November) and Andrei Kurkov's Diary of an Invasion, out early November.

The two best-selling books in the fair's Spanish pavilion, by far, have been Papyrus, that is, the German translation of El infinity en un reed by Irene Vallejo, and that of Empty Spain by Sergio del Molino. In one of the airport bookstores, yesterday, Isabel Allende was the only author who originally writes in Spanish and, in fact, she has been another of the winners of Frankfurt, selling her new novel to several countries, which will be published simultaneously in Spanish, English and other languages ​​on June 23 next year.

The general director of the Book, María José Gálvez, was satisfied with the image and the results achieved by Spain at this fair, and launched the good news that, despite the fact that Spain is no longer the guest country of Frankfurt, "the budgets for 2023 maintain the same item destined for book translations, 400,000 euros, which hopefully will be maintained in the future because there is still a long way to go” . She stressed that "what is important is the large number of books that have been translated, and the image we have given that we are not only friendly, but also good professionals with whom you can do business." With 180 authors, the presence of independent publishers and booksellers, and 56 organized round tables, the baton was handed over to Slovenia, the guest of 2023, in an act in which the Galician Manuel Rivas spoke.

For his part, the director of the Institut Ramon Llull, Pere Almeda, highlighted the presence of 50 Catalan publishers and that "Barcelona has already been present as a guest at this fair in 1976 (Latin America), 1991 (Spain), 2007 ( Catalunya) and now, since on all four occasions they were books made mainly in the Catalan capital”. He also pointed out that “I would have liked the Catalan authors present to have expressed themselves in Catalan”.

Following tradition, a football team made up of German writers challenged a selection of authors from the guest country. The result was 3-1 in favor of Germany. Álex Grijelmo (goalkeeper), Gabi Martínez, Nacho Carretero, Gálder Reguera, Carmen Berasategui, Emilio Sánchez Mediavilla, Pablo García Casado and Marta San Miguel, among others, played for the Spanish team. One of the German goals was scored by Wolfram Eilenberger, author of the Taurus editorial, directed by the coach of the Spanish team, Miguel Aguilar, who, at the end of the match, was proud of the game played and declared: “We deserved to win”.