Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2025: Katja Petrowskaja to deliver speech honouring Karl Schlögel

The Ukrainian-German author, journalist and literary scholar Katja Petrowskaja will deliver the speech honouring Karl Schlögel, recipient of this year’s Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The award ceremony will take place at 11 am on Sunday 19 October 2025 in the framework of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The event will be broadcast live on German television (ZDF) from the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt.

Katja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kiev (Ukraine) and studied literature and Slavic studies in Tartu (Estonia) from 1987 to 1992. After first receiving a research fellowship to study at Stanford University and Columbia University, she went on to earn her doctorate in literary studies and Slavic studies in 1998 in Moscow. In 1999, she moved to Berlin and began working for Russian-language media and German-language newspapers (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, taz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Deutsche Welle, Snob, Radio Liberty).

In 2013, Petrowskaja’s short story “Vielleicht Esther” (“Maybe Esther: A Family Story”) was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for German Literature. In this work, the author’s quest to trace the now faint outlines of members of a far-reaching family takes her across much of Europe and through the catastrophes of the 20th century all the way into her present day. The compass Petrowskaja uses on this journey is language – a language that moves along the edges of what is even expressible in words. “Vielleicht Esther” was published by Suhrkamp in 2014 and translated into more than 30 languages. It went on to receive numerous awards, including the “aspekte” Literature Prize (2014), the Ernst Toller Prize (2015) and the Schubart Literature Prize (2015).

In 2015, Petrowskaja began writing a column titled “Bild der Woche” (tr. Picture of the week) for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. It was a genre she invented herself: short prose as an encounter between the gaze and the image then transformed into language as a means of drawing truth from a fragment of the present. In 2022, she collected these texts in a book titled “Das Foto schaute mich an” (tr. The image looked at me). Since the launch of Russia’s war of aggression, Petrowskaja has written exclusively about the people of Ukraine. These texts have now culminated in the volume “Als wäre es vorbei. Texte aus dem Krieg” (tr. As if it were over. Texts from the war), which was published this year.

For her literary work and advocacy, especially on behalf of the people of Ukraine, Katja Petrowskaja has received numerous awards, including the Human Rights Prize of the Gerhart and Renate Baum Foundation (2022), the Gustav Regler Prize (2023) and the Horst Bingel Prize for Literature (2024).

For more information on the 2025 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, please visit www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de

Media service: 
A press photo of Katja Petrowskaja is available for download at www.boersenverein.de/pressefotos.