Olga Grjasnowa spent the first years of her life in Baku, Azerbaijan. When she was eleven, she and her family left the Soviet Union. “On 22 January 1996, my parents emigrated to the FRG with my brother and myself. Officially we were classified as ‘Jewish quota refugees’, although I can’t claim that we fled the country. We simply decided that we wanted democracy and a stable system,” writes Grjasnowa matter-of-factly in her essay Privilegien. It’s her German passport in particular that distinguishes her from the many refugees who migrate to Germany today. “I was given it,” she adds, “because my family was almost exterminated by the armed forces and Jewish immigration was tolerated in the 1990s.”

Grjasnowa recalls that the claim made by some of her teachers that “my German wasn’t good enough because I spoke with an accent,” initially diverted her towards a degree course in art history and Slavic studies before she finally found the courage to study literary writing. Her first novel, All Russians Love Birches (2012), was widely acclaimed by literary critics and won Grjasnowa numerous awards, including the Anna Seghers Prize. While this novel deals with a young Jewish girl's immigration to Germany, her third novel City of Jasmine (2017) engages with the current political crisis in Syria and the mass emigration of many Syrians from the war zone.

Further literature:
Aydemir, Fatma u. Yaghoobifarah, Hengameh (Hg.): Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Berlin: Ullstein fünf 2019.
Luschina, Nadja: Russisches Fräuleinwunder auf Deutsch. Deutschsprachige Erzählliteratur von Autorinnen aus den Nachfolgestaaten der Sowjetunion zwischen 2005 und 2012. Berlin: Peter Lang 2018.
Kampel, Felix: Peripherer Widerstand. Der neue Nationalismus im Spiegel jüdischer Gegenwartsliteratur. Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2017.
Werner, Florian (Hg.): Wenn ich groß bin, werd ich Dichter. Frühe Texte bekannter Autoren. Hamburg: Arche Verlag 2015.

Selected works:
Gott ist nicht schüchtern (Roman, 2017)
Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe (Roman, 2014)
Der Russe ist einer der Birken liebt (Roman, 2012)