Vladimir Makanin wins European Prize for literature
Baku, November 14 (AZERTAC). Russian writer Vladimir Makanin has won the European Prize for literature.
The prize awarding ceremony will be held in Strasburg where the headquarters of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament are located, next spring.
According to the jury, Makanin fully fits into the role of a “European writer of world level.”
The Prize was awarded to him for making a general contribution to literature.
In 1993, Makanin won the Booker Prize for “Baize-covered Table with Decanter.”
Later the writer was awarded Russia`s State Prize, Pushkin Prize of the Tepfer fund and the “Big Book` Prize.
Vladimir Makanin was born in 1937 in Orsk, a city which straddles the Ural River. Makanin himself recalls how every morning he would cross from the “European” side where he lived, into Asia, to go to school, before returning back to Europe in the evening. Makanin`s love of chess led him to enter Moscow State University to study Mathematics - and for six years after that he was a mathematician working in a laboratory of the Dzherzhinsky Military Academy. He has lived in Moscow ever since.
After attending a film course in 1963, however, Makanin`s interests took a more literary direction and he began to write. His short stories quickly made his name amongst Russian intelligentsia circles and his first novel, “Прямая линия” (The Straight Line), appeared in 1967. With the end of Khrushchev`s “thaw” in the late 1960s, Makanin fell out of favour and was largely ignored by Soviet literary critics for the next twenty years. From the 1980s onwards, however, he was increasingly “re-discovered” by a new generation of critics and writers. In 1993 Makanin won the Russian Booker Prize for “Стол, покрытый сукном и с графином посередине” (“Baize-covered Table with Decanter”), in 1998 the Pushkin Prize and, in 1999, the State Prize of the Russian Federation. His most recent work, “Асан” (Asan), won the Big Book Prize in 2008.
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