The Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon is being awarded the 2024 Berman Literature Prize. The prize sum is 750,000 Swedish kronor.

The jury’s motivation reads:

“Eduardo Halfon is being awarded the 2024 Berman Literature Prize for his novel Canción which, with an inimitable sense of style and an impressionistic auto-fictional narrative, dissolves every boundary between identity and mask, home and diaspora, past and present.”

Eduardo Halfon was born in Guatemala in 1971 and has lived in the United States, Spain, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere. In all his autofictional short novels – such as The Polish Boxer (2008), Monastery (2014), Mourning (2017) and Canción (2021) – he has explored the multifaceted legacy of the Diaspora and the transformative power of imagination. Halfon has been translated into fifteen languages such as English, French, German, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch, and he has won a raft of awards and distinctions, including Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature, his country’s highest literary honor. The novel Canción, in which an author called Eduardo Halfon is invited to a conference for Lebanese authors in Japan and begins reflecting on his Jewish paternal grandfather’s Syrian-Lebanese background and dramatic kidnapping by Guatemalan guerillas in the 1960s, was awarded the Spanish literary prize Premio Cálamo in 2021, and was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award 2024. Eduardo Halfon lives in Berlin with his family.

“Eduardo Halfon’s Canción is a rich portrayal of how lives are shaped by different layers of identity, how chance and violence affect people, regardless of language or culture,” says Daniel Pedersen, Chairman of the Jury. “A short novel that manages the feat of uniting the long and broken lines of history.”

Russian author Maria Stepanova is the 2023 laureate of the Berman Literature Prize, a sum of SEK 750,000.

The jury’s motivation reads: 

“Maria Stepanova is being awarded the 2023 Berman Literature Prize for her genretranscending family saga In Memory of Memory . With winding, finely honed prose she breathes life into pictures, objects, places and documents, in a portrayal of the transformative power of memory, both for individuals and for forgotten collectives.”

Maria Michailovna Stepanova was born in Moscow on 9 June 1972, and graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in 1995. Stepanova is a poet, and as such has been published in various magazines and anthologies. She has had a major influence on contemporary Russian poetry, and has won several important Russian and international awards. Stepanova also works as a journalist and started the online magazine Openspace.ru in 2007, which she left in 2012 along with most of the editorial team when its funding ceased. Since then she has been editor-in-chief of Colta.ru, a crowdfunded online news-paper where she writes about Russian art and culture. The newspaper has now been closed down by the Russian regime. Maria Stepanova has been translated into a dozen or so languages, and in 2018–19 she was the Siegfried Unseld guest professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She was later invited to Columbia University as Harriman Writer in Residence. Stepanova was one of the first Russian authors to protest the invasion of Ukraine with an essay entitled "The War of Putin’s Imagination" in the Financial Times. She has been living in exile in Berlin since 2022. In 2018 she published In Memory of Memory
( Памяти памяти Swedish translation 2019 by Nils Håkanson, Nirstedt/litteratur). The book explores private and cultural memories in a blend of essay, travel journal, memoire and fiction – all in a personal, poetic prose. 2020 saw the publication of her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals ( Старый мир. Починка жизни, 2021 Swedish translation by Ida Börjel and Nils Håkanson Nirstedt/litteratur). In spring 2023, Maria Stepanova’s Winterpoem 20/21 is published by Suhrkamp Verlag, which is in Russian with a German translation.

“In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova is a wonderful book,” says jury chairman Daniel Pedersen, “in which poetic reflections, theoretical reasoning and family saga are united and truly capture both individual and collective destiny in a remark-able literary construction”.

Berman Literature Prize amounting to 750.000 Swedish Kronor is awarded to the Hungarian author Péter Nádas

The jury’s motivation reads: 

»Péter Nádas is awarded the Berman Literature Prize for his autobiographical novel Illuminated Details, in which he demonstrates, with razor-sharp observation and stunning artistic luminosity, how an individual’s life can contain a microcosm that in every moment and every detail turns outwards to face the twentieth century’s larger universe of losses and disasters.«

Péter Nádas was born in Budapest in 1942. He made his debut with the story The Bible, (A Biblia) published in a magazine in 1965, and twelve years later came his first novel, A Book of Memories (Emlékiratok könyve, 1986), Parallel Stories (Párhuzamos történetek, 2005) and Illuminated Details (Világló részletek, 2017). He has published books of essays, novels and stories. A particular characteristic is his keen interest in photography. His books have been translated into nearly thirty languages and he has won countless awards.

»Péter Nádas is one of a long line of European epic story-tellers,« says chairman of the jury Daniel Pedersen. »Illuminated Details is a veritable work of memory in which Nádas combines tiny details with major historical upheavals. The spirit of the Berman Literature Prize is about the crossing of boundaries, which is what this novel does. Between generations, people and times. All this is channelled through the author’s stream of associations, resulting in a massive portrayal of memories from a life.«

The first Berman Literature Prize is awarded to the Israeli author David Grossman.

The jury’s motivation reads: 

“With his novel Life Plays With Me (2019, Swedish translation by Natalie Lantz Med mig leker livet, 2020) Grossman has illustrated a movable mosaic of memories where inherited traumas, family betrayals and a love larger than life are merged into a deeply human depiction of several generations of Jewish life in Europe and Israel.”

David Grossman is today one of the most internationally well-known Israeli authors. Since his debut in the early 80s his books have been translated to more than forty-five languages. In addition to the novels, David Grossman has written books of essays, novels for young adults, several children books, and a libretto for a children opera. Twelve titles have been translated to Swedish.

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem 1954 and studied both theatre and philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before his debut as an author, he was active within media, both as a radio host and moderator. He has been wrestling with the trauma of war and the prospects for peace, as well as love, jealousy, and family relationships for more than three decades.

“We are very happy to honor David Grossman as our first laureate” says the chairman of the jury, Daniel Pedersen. He continues: “Grossman embodies through his rich authorship the spirit in which the Berman Literature Prize was instituted. He is able to describe the way both trauma and memories are transferred between generations and in which he conjoins the emotional life with the great political events of the individual.”