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Joanna Rubin Dranger nominated for The Nordic Council Literature Prize!

Posted on 23/02/2023 in

Bonnier Rights is proud to announce that graphic novelist Joanna Rubin Dranger has been nominated for The Nordic Council Literature Prize 2023 for the documentary graphic novel REMEMBER US TO LIFE.

This is the first time a graphic novel has received the nomination for the prestigious award.

The jury’s motivation goes as follows:

When Joanna Rubin Dranger had just become an adult when her beloved aunt Susanne took her own life. In the genre-crossing volume REMEMBER US TO LIFE – a comprehensive and wide-ranging book not only in terms of weight and number of pages – Rubin Dranger portrays in both text and image how she many years later begins to unravel what led to her aunt’s suicide, and how she breaks the silence and the rewrites her upbringing, during which relatives had “disappeared” or were not mentioned at all. The threads lead to the persecution of Jews before and during the Second World War in Germany, Poland, Lithuania and Russia – but also to the anti-Semitism and isolation in the Scandinavian countries and the devastating consequences of the unwillingness to offer help. They lead straight into darkness, to concentration camps, murder and abuse. But also to the joy of meeting surviving relatives in the US and Israel. Rubin Dranger depicts in drawings and pictures how she is faced with painful news and unexpected questions. Some she manages to answer, others not. The way in which the reader also gets to experience and think about all these difficult angles is one of the book’s many strengths.

As the questions pile up, Joanna Rubin Dranger feels she must know the names of those who were murdered and what their lives were like. Writing and drawing the story of the disappeared becomes an act of resistance that approaches magical thinking: the Nazis wiped out these people and all their memories, Rubin Dranger evokes them from oblivion and tells about the lives they lived, lives that were taken from them.

Ultimately, the project is about heeding the words of the Jewish prayer and about remembering the dead back to life. When Rubin Dranger discovers that there was a little boy in the family who was murdered and whose name no one even remembers, she lets the reader along on a desperate search for answers. Finding his name is suddenly all that matters, and when she finally does, both she and the reader sense just how important memory is – that it reaches back, through the decades, and sets things right. So the book itself becomes a kind of meta-project – by giving us the names of the murdered and carefully drawing their photographs and portraits, the dead are recreated. History cannot be changed in retrospect, but the dead come to life when we remember them.

The style of the book is straight and simple, both in terms of text and images, but it never simplifies. The gaze rests steadily straight towards the darkness, both of history and the darkness that Dranger soon discovers within her own being. In this way, Rubin Dranger not only portrays the history of her family, but also its common great trauma – and how this trauma continues to affect generation after generation and is also present in herself.

REMEMBER US TO LIFE is an intelligent combination of text and image that allows these elements to reinforce each other. The effect is almost overwhelming. Photographs and other documents are mixed with Dranger’s own effective drawings, in a story that has an expression all its own. The book is a documentary novel, as it is called on the cover, but also so much more: a graphic novel, a historical story, a kind of writer’s diary and an autobiography. Both for her and for the reader, it will also be a test. What has happened comes so close that you cannot shy away from it.

Joanna Rubin Dranger, born in 1970, has published several notable graphic novels since her debut in 1999. She often mixes drastic humor with existential questions, and several times she directs her searchlight at contemporary narrow gender roles. Today she works as a professor at Konstfack in Stockholm. The fact that her book project is growing against a fund of increased, new-age anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Europe escapes neither the reader nor Rubin Dranger herself. She does not avoid the historical past. But not for the ongoing present either. REMEMBER US TO LIFE is a stylistically accomplished work and a courageous historical document. How we read the book is in many ways connected to several of the fateful questions of contemporary Europe today.

REMEMBER US TO LIFE was first published by Albert Bonnier Förlag in March 2022.

About the Nordic Council Literature Prize:

The Nordic Council Literature Prize has been awarded since 1962 and is given to a work of fiction written in one of the Nordic languages. This may be a novel, a play, or a collection of poems, short stories, or essays that are of a high literary and artistic quality. The prize is designed to generate interest in the literature and language of neighbouring countries, and in the Nordic cultural community.