© Heike Steinweg
Author
Katya Petrovskaya was born in Kiev in 1970. She is a Ukrainian-German literary scholar, author and journalist. She spent her childhood in Kiev. In Tartu (Estonia) she studied literature and Slavic studies. In 1998 she received her PhD from Moscow University, after which she moved to Berlin in 1999, where she lives with her husband and children. She works as a journalist for various Russian media (including Snob), and also contributes to German-language newspapers (Neue Zürcher Zeitung and taz). Since 2011 she has been writing the column “Die west-östliche Diva” for the FAS. In 2012, she published an essay about the search for a piece of her Soviet childhood in photographer Anita Back’s illustrated book Die Auserwählte. In 2013 she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with an excerpt from her work “Maybe Esther.” In it, she describes the extermination of Jews in Kiev by the Nazis through the story of Esther, which is based on the fate of her great-grandmother, who was deported to Kiev in 1941 and murdered in the Babi Yar massacre. The novel was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2014, and won the literature prize of the ZDF culture program “Aspekte” in the same year, the Ernst Toller Prize, the Schubart Literature Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo in 2015, and the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize (shortlist) in 2019. In her 2015 research project “Everything that is the Case” at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK), Petrovskaya described the tension between photography and the viewer. In May 2022, her last work, Das Foto schaute mich an (The Photograph Looked at Me), is published, described as “prosaminiatures that combine to form a deep chronicle of the historical moment.” In 2022, as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she appears on ARD talk shows to talk about the West’s moral duty to militarily support Ukraine.
Events
Katja Petrowskaja: Als wäre es vorbei
Thu, 9. Jul // 20:00,
Maschinenhaus (Kulturbrauerei) entrance: Knaackstraße 97, 10435 Berlin
