Leipzig Book Fair Prize: Barbi Marković’s “Mini Horror” surprisingly wins

2024-03-21 17:54:25

Culture Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair

Barbi Marković’s “Mini Horror” surprisingly wins in Leipzig

As of: 7:04 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes

Buchpreisgewinnerin Barbi Marković

Source: dpa

The joy of discovery instead of convention: There are three surprising prizes at the book fair. Barbi Marković’s “Mini Horror” wins in fiction, which not only comic fans are happy about. There are also outsider victories in non-fiction and translation.

Right next to the glass hall of the Leipzig Trade Fair are the halls of the Manga-Comic-Con, which takes place at the same time. The masses of cosplayers who not only populate public transport but also the other exhibition halls are a fixed topos of book fair reports. So it was a pretty good fit that the Leipzig Book Fair’s prize for fiction was awarded Barbi Markovics The comic novel “Mini Horror” was a book that only a few experts had previously considered.

In this case, a comic novel does not mean a picture story, but rather means the virtuoso play with the narrative conventions of classic comics and animated stories: Tom can be blown up by Jerry, thrown off a slope or chopped through the food processor as often as he wants in the next story he’s his old self again.

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Mini and Miki are the names of the not so mouse-like couple that the narrator, who was born in Belgrade in 1980 and lives in Vienna, chases through a deadly adventure called everyday life. Darkly humorous pop literature of a different kind, closer to the flashy drawings of Pop Art than much of the literature that has been published under this label for 25 years. The literary scholar and pop literature expert Moritz Baßler explained it like this: Barbi Marković “tells us about our present in an enchantingly funny and bitterly serious way: war crimes at the back, climate change at the front, and in between the banality of our everyday lives.”

Marković also delivered an ironic meta-criticism of superficiality in her speech disguised as an anti-speech, which, in the style of her novel, violated all conventions: “Mini gets the Leipzig Book Fair prize and she has to give a speech. … A speech that will solve all the problems of the present. Mini reads and the world stays the same; the audience turns away from her. …Mini’s speech is a terrible debacle and she is immediately thrown out of literature. Mini has to pay back the price. … She has to clean up after mass.”

The nominations of this year’s jury, chaired by critic Insa Wilke, were already surprising: a graphic novel was nominated for the first time in fiction, Anke Feuchtenberger’s brilliant work “Comrade Cuckoo”, the haunting story of growing up in the GDR. And for non-fiction, an extensive collection of “Voices of the Century 1945–2000”, i.e. a huge audio book project, was put on the shortlist.

This exacerbated the problem of having to compare apples with pears, which has always been particularly virulent in Leipzig due to its broad categories (in Frankfurt, after all, only novels are ever entered into the book prize race). Not to honor a graphic novel artist of this international standing like Feuchtenberger is always somehow strange, no matter how cheeky and innovative Marković is.

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In the non-fiction book, on the other hand, an absolutely unusual mixed form of essay, art project, mentality-historical archive work and theory was chosen: Tom Holert’s “approx. 1972 Violence – Environment – Identity – Method” (Spector Books”) was preferred to more conventional non-fiction books about the history of democracy or the dilemmas of global climate policy.

Even in the translations, an outsider, Ki-Hyang Lee, who translated from Korean, won, who – like Holert – was so surprised that she had not prepared any speech and was unable to utter a word long before she was emotionally overwhelmed. She received the award for her broadcast of the stories of Bora Chung: “The Curse of the Rabbit”.

The prize has remained true to its line of recent years of focusing on the overlooked, the (apparently) remote, and also the difficult and hard-to-sell, even if Marković certainly has the potential to significantly increase her fan base. That has its charm, but the distance to Frankfurt is getting bigger and bigger, especially when it comes to the effect of the price on the book market.

The last time a book with bestseller potential won here was Lutz Seiler’s post-reunification novel “Stern 111” in 2020 under exceptional pandemic conditions. With its selection, the prize shows how diverse the narrative forms are, both in fiction and non-fiction, Insa Wilke reiterated this at the beginning. But there was no doubt about that beforehand.