Yesterday, November 26, Katerina Gordeeva's Take My Grief Away was awarded the prestigious Geschwister-Scholl Preis. In her speech, Katerina read a poem by Zhenya Berkovich, a theatre director and poet serving a six year prison sentence on political charges. The speech was followed by standing ovations.
The Geschwister Scholl Prize has been awarded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association - Bavarian Regional Association and the City of Munich since 1980. The purpose and aim of the Geschwister Scholl Prize is to annually honor a recent book that, as the statutes state, "demonstrates intellectual independence and is capable of promoting civil freedom, moral, intellectual and aesthetic courage and of giving important impulses to responsible contemporary awareness." Prize winners in recent years have included David van Reybrouck, Andrej Kurkow, Joe Sacco, Dina Nayeri, Ahmet Altan, Götz Aly, Achille Mbembe, Glenn Greenwald, Otto Dov Kulka, Liao Yiwu, Joachim Gauck, Roberto Saviano, David Grossman and Anna Politkovskaja.
"Take My Grief Away is an unflinching record of the cost of war that centres the human voice and experience,"[Katerina’s] journalistic skill and ability to bring out the voice of her interviewees make for an incredibly powerful, often harrowing, read. Take My Grief Away shows what war does to us." - commissioning editor Suzanne Connelly, Ebury/Random House.