The writer, translator, and publisher Ilija Trojanow was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1965. His family fled to the Federal Republic of Germany via Yugoslavia and Italy in 1971, and a year later, moved to Nairobi, Kenya, where Trojanow grew up, apart from a three-year stay in Germany. After his studies in Munich, he founded the publishing house Kyrill und Method Verlag, later called Marino Verlag, both with a focus on African literature.
With »Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall« (1996; tr: The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner), he made his widely acclaimed debut as a novelist. The family saga with autobiographical background presents, among social criticism, the fundamental motif and concern of this author with exuberant storytelling and changing tones: cultural heterogeneity not as evil or misfortune, but as normality, opportunity or even stroke of luck. Trojanow repeatedly critically examined the country of his birth and its current situation. Years of research in Bulgaria went into his report »Hundezeiten« (1999; tr: Dog Ages), which was revised in 2006 under the title »Die fingierte Revolution« (tr: The Sham Revolution): a provocative reckoning with the old nomenclature, which has transformed itself into a new oligarchy under the guise of democracy. He also explored Bulgaria in his documentary »Vorwärts und nie vergessen« (2007; tr: Forwards and Never Forget), in which he recorded conversations with former political prisoners, and various newspaper reports. So far, the author’s greatest literary success has been the novel »Der Weltensammler« (2006; Eng. »The Collector of Worlds«, 2008). In it, Trojanow approaches the British colonial officer and orientalist Richard Francis Burton through the means of fiction, who familiarized himself with numerous cultures, religions, and languages as an eccentric master of disguise, translated »1001 Nights« and the Kamasutra, traveled incognito to Mecca, and searched for the sources of the White Nile. His novel »EisTau« (2011; tr: IceMelt) is dedicated to the glaciologist Zeno, the sublimity and at the same time the endangerment of nature. Most recently, among others, Trojanow has released the novels »Macht und Widerstand« (2015; tr: Power and Resistance) and »Doppelte Spur« (2020; tr: Double Track), the experience report »Meine Olympiade. Ein Amateur, vier Jahre, 80 Disziplinen« (2016; tr: My Olympics: One amateur, four years, 80 disciplines),, the literary-political essay »Nach der Flucht« (2017; tr: After the Escape), as well as the utopian novel »Tausend und ein Morgen« (2023, tr: A Thousand and One Mornings).
Ilija Trojanow has been honored with numerous awards, including the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Prize, the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Berlin Literature Prize, the Austrian Book Trade’s honorary prize for tolerance in thought and action. He was the city writer in Mainz, held a Heiner-Müller guest professorship in Berlin, and was a poetic lecturer in Tübingen. Trojanow lives in Vienna.
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