Claudia Dathe

Claudia Dathe, a translator and a literary scholar. She studied translation (Russian and Polish) and business administration in Leipzig, Pyatigorsk (Russia) and Krakow. From 1997 to 2004 she worked as a DAAD lecturer in Kazakhstan and Ukraine. After returning to Germany, she worked as a freelance translator for Ukrainian and Russian and conducted seminars for young literary translators. From 2009 to 2020 she worked as a coordinator for projects on literary translation and cultural mediation at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the University of Tübingen. Since 2021 she is coordinating the project “European Times” at the European University Viadrina.

The focus of her academic research is on Ukrainian Futurism. She carries out numerous projects on the dissemination and contextualization of Ukrainian literature in German-speaking countries. She is involved in the project “The Translator's Perspective: Ukrainian Authors in Text, Essay, Clip”, she co-organizes the monthly online series “Reading for Ukraine” and the advanced education series on Ukrainian literature for German-speaking Slavists. She co-edited the volume „Ein Hauch von Grauen und verborgene Hoffnung. Anthology of Ukrainian Texts on the First World War” (Arco, 2024).

She translates literature from Ukrainian, Polish and Russian into German, including works by Andrej Kurkov, Serhij Zhadan, Ostap Slyvynsky and Yevgenia Belorusets. In 2020, together with Yevgenia Belorusets, she was awarded the International Literature Prize for the book “Glückliche Fälle” and in 2021 the Drahomán Prize for the translation of Serhij Zhadan's poetry collection “Antenna” and the novel “Märchen aus meinem Luftschutzkeller” by Oleksii Chupa. In 2022 she received the Wilhelm Merton Prize for European Translation.