Fabelhafte Wirklichkeit

The Finnish-Kosovan author Pajtim Statovci is acclaimed as a rising star of European literature and has earned a reputation internationally for his literary originality. He moved to Finland with his Albanian parents when he was two years old. Today, he lives and works in Helsinki.

His novel My Cat Yugoslavia is about exodus and migration, about conflict, belonging and love and about a search for identity in today’s Europe. The plot naturally combines the fantastic and the surreal. Two stories, one family, who fled in the 1990s from Kosovo to Finland. On the one hand is the world of the young student Bekim in Helsinki who contacts men on dating Apps whom he meets for sex. His mother, who grew up in 1980s Yugoslavia, was married aged seventeen to a man whom she had only met once before the marriage. The life experiences could not be more different. Estranged from his family, Bekim spends most of the time alone in his apartment. Then, in a bar he meets a singing and talking cat and begins an affair with her.

*** BIOGRAPHIE ***

Pajtim Statovci
b. 1990. Author and doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. His work has won many awards including the International Prize for Literature from the House of World Cultures, Berlin. Recently published in German translation: Bolla, Luchterhand 2025.