Sofia Andruchowytsch

Sofia Andrukhovych was born in 1982 in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine. She is a writer, publicist and literary translator. She has been publishing prose since 2002 and has since been awarded numerous prizes, most recently with the International Hermann Hesse Prize 2024 for her »Amadoka« epic (together with her translators Alexander Kratochvil and Maria Weissenböck).

Her breakthrough came with »Фелікс Австрія« (2014; Eng. »Felix Austria«, forthcoming). The novel, set against the backdrop of a small Austro-Hungarian town in western Galicia around 1900, draws equally on fantasy and realism and tells of the painful symbiosis between two women who, for fateful reasons, have grown up together without being siblings. Into this unequal relationship enters – alongside many other finely drawn secondary characters – the titular Felix, a mythical-looking contortionist who can squeeze himself into any niche and soon causes great disorder. »Felix Austria« is a novel about the intertwining of the individual and the epoch, as well as a drama about the subjectification of both individuals and entire ethnic groups against the backdrop of an imperial order that is coming to an end.

Andrukhovych’s more than 1,000-page »Amadoka« epic (2020), named after a lake that, according to 15th and 16th century cartographers, is said to have existed in what is now western Ukraine, tells of the impact of the past on the present. The author explores the Ukrainian past through three women’s biographies in which the roles of perpetrator and victim become blurred. She skillfully interweaves the war in eastern Ukraine with repression under Stalin, sheds light on Jewish-Ukrainian relations and the Holocaust under German occupation. »If ever a novel has found a form and a tone for the history of Ukraine in all its suffering and with all its abysses, then it is this dizzying epic« (»Süddeutsche Zeitung«).

Sofia Andrukhovych is the daughter of the writer Jury Andrukhovych and lives with her daughter and husband in Kyiv.

Der Papierjunge

Residenz Verlag
Salzburg, 2016
[Ü: Maria Weissenböck]

Die Geschichte von Romana

Residenz Verlag
Salzburg, 2023
[Ü: Alexander Kratochvil und Maria Weissenböck]

Die Geschichte von Uljana

Residenz Verlag
Salzburg, 2023
[Ü: Alexander Kratochvil und Maria Weissenböck]

Die Geschichte von Sofia

Residenz Verlag
Salzburg, 2024
[Ü: Alexander Kratochvil und Maria Weissenböck]