Talking Europe hosts Austrian author Robert Menasse, the winner of the 2023 European Union book prize. The award was set up in 2007 to foster a European spirit and promote understanding of the EU from a cultural perspective. The prize has previously been bestowed on such towering figures as Jonathan Coe, Philippe Sands and Tony Judt. Menasse is the only writer to have won the award twice. We discuss his prize-winning novel "The Enlargement", which takes places against the backdrop of the actual enlargement of the European Union. It forms the second novel in his trilogy, after "The Capital" in 2019.
Asked why he is drawn to the European Union as the subject matter for his books, Menasse says: "I am a novelist. What is a novel? What should a novel be able to tell? Contemporaneity. For us Europeans, the European Union is producing the basics and the context of all our lives; of our search for luck and wealth. It's European law which interferes in our lives, which defines our lives. So if I try to tell how we are living today, what our problems are, how we try to resolve them, and why we are not able to resolve them, that has all the time to do with the context of European law and the reality of the European Union."
