23 May 2011 Bank Austria Literaris Award for Inga Iwasiów
Inga Iwasiów has won the Austrian Bank Austria Literaris award in the Central European literature category for her novel Bambino. The author was a guest of the second edition of the Conrad Festival – she took part in a meeting entitled Family stories, during which the participants discussed, among other things, the awarded book.
Bambino is set in the author’s family city, Szczecin, in the post-war period when it was inhabited by people from many parts of Poland and from the former borderlands. The titular Bambino bar is the place where the book’s characters, people as different as shades of post-war Poland, meet. The novel was nominated for the Nike Literary Award in 2009. It was translated into German by Esther Kinsky. The Bank Austria Literaris is one of the most important Austrian literary prizes awarded since 2006 to writers and poets from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Its previous winners include Romanian writer Florin Lazarescu and a Slovak poet, Rudolf Jurolek.
