Leichte Sprache
Cristina Morales │ Friederike von Criegern
Internationaler Literaturpreis 2022
Jury’s comment
Sharp-tongued and uncompromising, Morales tells the story of four women with disabilities who live in an assisted living community in Barcelona. Leichte Sprache (Easy Reading) shows how they are controlled, pathologized, bullied, in short disabled by their environment, but also shows their resistant strategies, their self-assertion. Friederike von Criegern accurately translates Morales’ wit and love of language, as well as her fine eye for linguistic mechanisms of exclusion – be it the stifling demonstration of power by bureaucratic language or the hierarchy-obscuring language of avant-gardism. Ultimately, the novel itself is a montage: Each woman introduces herself through her own textual form. In particular, the WhatsApp novel within a novel, written in Easy Read, shows with poetic clarity who benefits when facts, even conditions, disappear behind elaborate verbiage. Leichte Sprache is not an easy read, but one that makes radical demands – on us, on the present.
– Dominique Haensell
Author: Cristina Morales
Cristina Morales studied law and political science and works as a legal interpreter in Barcelona. She has written several award-winning novels and short stories and is considered one of the best young authors in Spain. Her novel Lectura fácil (Easy Reading) was awarded the Premio Herralde de Novela, and in 2019 she became the youngest author to win the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Premio Nacional de Narrativa. Morales is a dancer and choreographer with the contemporary dance company Iniciativa Sexual Femenina.
Translator: Friederike von Criegern
Friederike von Criegern is a literary translator and freelance lecturer in literature and translation. She received her PhD on Chilean poetry and translates fiction, poetry and theater from Spanish, most recently by Jorge Comensal, Nona Fernández and Floridor Pérez. After living in Peru, Chile and Argentina, she now lives in Göttingen.