Reading List
Nino Haratischwili
Georgian-Born German Novelist and Playwright
Nino Haratischwili, born in Tbilisi in 1983, is a novelist, playwright and theatre director, and one of the most widely read authors of contemporary German literature. Her third novel, The Eighth Life (for Brilka), was translated into 30 languages and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Anna Seghers Prize and the Bertolt Brecht Prize. It was longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. The Lack of Light came out in English in 2025. Her picks here come from a Shelf Awareness Q&A: Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, Veteranyi’s Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
“Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was groundbreaking for me as a woman.” — via Interview, September 2025
Pippi Longstocking
by Astrid Lindgren · 2005 · Children's
“I loved that she was a girl and yet so fearless and brave, so "crazy" and different.” — via Interview, September 2025
Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta
by Aglaja Veteranyi · 2012 · Fiction
“One of the most beautiful and saddest autobiographical books by a Romanian-Swiss author, which has accompanied me for 20 years” — via Interview, September 2025
Sabbath’s Theater
by Philip Roth · 1996 · Fiction
“For me, this is a highlight of Roth's work and such a merciless examination of life and death.” — via Interview, September 2025
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov · 2016 · Classics
“For me, it's a masterpiece on so many levels! A testimony to the absurdity of the Soviet system, a philosophical treatise and at the same time one of the most beautiful, saddest and at the same time funniest books I have ever read.” — via Interview, September 2025
