Collector Duct

Collector Duct

Mario didn't even live to be fourteen years old. He tells us why from his grave. He speaks about how two groups build their own empire in underground catacombs, for which they fight until death, about friendship and a phenomenal boxing match between his best friend Rajko and a gang of neo-Nazis.
With lots of black humor, but also full of hope and love, Mario tells of violence, of being an outsider and of the bleak existence among prefabricated housing blocks, where parents are just as absent as a future. This eloquent novel casts an uncanny spell that one rarely encounters - perhaps never. Just like the adults in the concrete housing blocks.

- Winner of Peter-Härtling Prize 2023
- Unusual narrative perspective: the protagonist narrates from his grave
- Atmospheric, evocative, post-romantic
- Loosely based on the story of Sinto boxer Johann Wilhelm "Rukeli" Trollmann, who was beaten to death in a concentration camp in 1944
- Themes: Peer pressure, imposed violence and refusal to accept it, being an outsider.

Excerpt from the jury's statement:
With this artistic device, the oppressive and violent atmosphere of post-reunification adolescence in a large East German city is portrayed extremely vividly and, at the same time, from an otherworldly distance. Thus, the novel combines the omnipresent dreariness and insecurity with hope and resistance, and discusses with a light-handed touch the question of what remains of a life that is abruptly cut short.
"I loved every sentence," says Youth Literature Award winner and jury member Susan Kreller.