Awards

• Winner of BBC Book of the Year Award 2016
• Winner of BBC Book of the Year Award 2016
• Winner of Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2018
• Winner of Joseph Conrad Korzienowski Literary Prize 2013
• Winner of Kristal Vilencia Literary Award 2013

Overview

Two tales of exile intertwined into a profound double portrait, Forgottenness painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, between the collective and the individual, between the histories of two people born on the same day, a century apart. The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882-1931), a once significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time. As she plunges into her nation's history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question - what does it mean to remember?

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9781739842345

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Reviews

"It's no coincidence that time and memory are the big topic today, feeding off the anxieties of the world. Tanja Maljartschuk's novel is about the giant blue whale of time swallowing everything living on its way. What she is interested in is not even disappearance but tracelessness. Both personal and political, this book rages against time and oblivion as all true literature does. - Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter (International Booker Prize 2023); [Maljartschuk] stands out as an author who asks in which time we live, who wants to recognize and present the truth about it with literary and essayistic means. —Theodore Kramer Prize for Writing in Resistance and Exile; Maljartschuk is an outstanding storyteller who writes against the erasure of Ukrainian history. - volksblatt.at; A literarily impressive novel that shows what it means when one's identity consists of fear, obedience, and oblivion. - buchmagazin; Tanja Maljartschuk sensitively links a fictional and a real, historical life story from Ukraine. - Kleine Zeitung; Humorously melancholic [...] Thus the novel [... cleverly and artful resists oblivion. - Die Rheinpfalz; An exceptionally ambitious work that captivates with its clear, level-headed language. - Stern;The comforting thing about this book is its inconsolability. The blue whale closes its mouth and swims on. - Frankfurter Rundschau; ""[Maljartschuk] breathes literary life into the forgotten era with poetic imagination and cinematic embellishments [....] By turning Vyacheslav Lypynsky into a novel hero and making his daughter, with whom he had no contact, into a character who asks him questions at the end of his life, Maljartschuk strengthens the roots of the young Ukrainian historical consciousness, which is marked by the memory of setbacks and futile resistance. [...] Lypynsky's sense of solidarity and responsibility for the country colonized by his compatriots seems, from today's perspective, almost like a harbinger of the European idea. And his advocacy of a territorial principle of the new Ukraine, which was to be home to inhabitants of different origins, denominations and languages, could well teach the fractured Ukrainian society of today something."" - FAZ; ""A novel that dares and wins: The way Tanya Maljartschuk intertwines the small and large stories of her characters, the way she tells the story of her homeland, in very different literary forms and yet always remaining true to her style, is as convincing as it is impressive."" - taz; ""Maljartschuk [skillfully] weaves a fictional and a real life story into a poetic double portrait. Meticulously researched, the novel impresses with the wealth of material in its historical digressions as well as with the sensitive drawing of the souls of its protagonists."" - Kleine Zeitung; ""Her humorously melancholic novel is a dense yet successful attempt to erase a white mark in both Ukrainian and European history and to give it a face. Thus the novel, which states the 'lack of trace of disappearance', cleverly and artfully resists oblivion."" - Die Rheinpfalz; ""European literature has a new Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann, and this time it's a woman: her name is Tanya Maljartschuk."" - Vatican News"

Author Information

Tanja Maljartschuk, who was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine in 1983, has lived in Vienna since 2011. She studied Ukrainian philology and worked as a journalist in Kyiv. In Ukrainian, Tanja is the author of five collections of short prose, two novels, a young adult novel, and a forthcoming poetry collection. Her work has been translated into more than 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.

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