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The Russian writer Ludmila Ulítskaya, winner of the Formentor Prize 2022.PF
The Russian author Ludmila Ulítskaya (79 years old, Dablekánovo, Russia) has been awarded the Formentor Prize for Letters 2022. The jury has selected her "for the powerful narrative breath with which she records the most subtle emotions of the human soul, for the sensitivity with which the epic of the people thrown into the labyrinth of the world tells, for the delicacy with which it rehabilitates the dignity of men and women subjected to the despotic chance of misfortune, for the superb nature of its characters and their undulating, sharp and dazzling conversation ”.
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Ulítskaya, who has lived in exile in Berlin since March 2022 due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is one of the writers most critical of the Kremlin regime.
She was born in 1943 in the Urals, she graduated from Moscow University with a Master's degree in Biology.
She worked at the Institute of Genetics as a scientist.
Shortly before Perestroika she became repertory director of the Moscow Hebrew Theater (1979-1982) and screenwriter.
The jury, made up of Elide Pittarello, Marta Rebón, Gustavo Guerrero, Enric Bou and the director of the Formentor Foundation, Basilio Baltasar, highlights her role as heir to Russia's narrative tradition and how "she has updated the legacy of a formidable novelistic skill.
The Russian literary pantheon displays in Ulitskaya's work the admirable mastery of an influence that she elaborates, expands, and recreates as part of European literature."
The award will be presented in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria at the end of September.
The writer is one of the names that have sounded in the Nobel pools in recent years.
The judges also highlight "his deep love for the enigmatic real", they subscribe in the official note: "It makes flourish in his historical polyphonies, courage and despondency, enthusiasm and defection, and a stubborn mistrust of dogmas, axioms, paradigms, systems and devices of any origin.
Her ethic of charitable responsibility is anchored in an imminent and close sense of the sacred.
A dimension that slips into the daily lives of human beings and shapes the consciousness of a secret lucidity”.
Ulitskaya is one of the most far-reaching writers in contemporary Russian literature.
She made her first appearance on the literary stage in the 1990s, when she published several collections of short stories filled with rich color and psychological detail.
She has so far published 15 fiction books (more than four and a half million copies sold worldwide), three children's stories and six plays performed in various theaters in Russia and Germany.
Her books have been translated in more than 15 countries.
