Without Waking Up

Sifting through memories, simple scenes nestled into one another like her own beloved wooden doll, the Matryoshka, Maja struggles to unearth her identity. She is marked by a lingering absence - of homeland, mother tongue, mother, warmth. Raised in an unfamiliar country by her taciturn aunt, Maja has brief moments of connection with her fading past such as through her childhood friendship with Marek, a Polish refugee with his own stories of love and loss in the face of war and displacement. An adult Maja finds herself again and again on the outside of her relationships with others, and with herself. This poetic, yet unadorned, account invites an open-ended exploration of the relationship between language and identity.

Carolina Schutti is an acclaimed Austrian author who lives in Innsbruck, where she was born in 1976. Her award-winning work, including five novels, has been translated into seventeen languages. She has also published a poetry collection, and several works for radio and theatre. She recently translated one of British writer Jen Calleja's long-form poems into German for Dust Sucker (2023).