The Photograph Looked Back at Me is a series of prose miniatures, each born from an image the author cannot turn away from: a ghostly plant printed in a book about Chernobyl; a miner's face obscured by smoke, hanging in a Kyiv gallery; a picture of Katja Petrowskaja's parents, from an old family album.
This collection, which has already been translated into French, Italian, Danish, and Slovak, is a haunting and deeply personal attempt to understand seeing and knowing—how the images that sear themselves into our brains, and our societies' collective memories, affect our feelings, our language, and our experience of the world. In The Photograph Looked Back at Me, the truth of photography and the truth of language find a way to speak to one another.
Katja Petrowskaja (born 1970 in Kyiv) is a Ukrainian-born German prose writer and journalist whose work explores memory, history, and the intersection of languages. Her literary debut, Maybe Esther (2014), which won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, has been translated into more than twenty languages. A member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, Petrowskaja is also a recipient of the Ernst Toller Prize (2019). Petrowskaja studied literature in Tartu and Moscow before settling in Berlin in 1999, where she writes for both German and Russian-language media. Her work consistently questions notions of belonging and truth, examining how family stories and fragmentary memories can unlock the traumatic experiences of the twentieth century.
Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole (original title:
Das Foto schaute mich an, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2022).
Graphic design:
Teo Schifferli.
2026 (publication expected by 4th quarter)
English edition
11 x 17 cm (softcover)
ISBN : 978-1-917913-12-6
EAN : 9781917913126
forthcoming
