Fiction backlist

La ragazza con la Leica

(The Girl with the Leica)

Ugo Guanda Editore, September 2017, pp.336

2018 Strega Prize Winner

18 editions – over 180,000 copies sold

Bagutta Prize Winner, Shortlisted Campiello Prize

The true story of Gerda Taro, a photojournalist killed during the Spanish Civil War at the age of twenty-six. A free, joyful woman who challenged the darkness of the 1930s, rediscovered through the eyes of those who loved her.

Full English translation available

August 1937. A sea of red flags makes its way through Paris. It is Gerda Taro’s funeral procession. She was the first photographer to die on the battlefield, who that very day would have turned twenty-seven. Robert Capa in the front row is devastated: he is the one who taught her to use her Leica camera, and together they covered the Spanish War and were willing to die for a country that was not theirs in the name of freedom. In the crowd are all the people who were somehow linked to Gerda: among them is Willy Chardack, her eternal loyal knight, to whom the irresistible girl preferred Georg Kutitzkes, now fighting in the International Brigades. Decades later, these two make an intercontinental phone call that triggers the creation of a multi-faceted novel based on original sources with Gerda as its beating heart. It is her heartbeat that weaves together faraway places and times, giving life to the Polaroids taken by these young adults during the 30s, whilst facing the economic depression, the rise of Nazism, and the hostility towards refugees, which in France targeted above all Jews and leftwing supporters like them.

Ugo Guanda Editore, September 2017, pp.336

  • “A biography, a feminist parable, a declaration of love for photography, and a tableau of the 1930s: The Girl with the Leica is all of this at once.”

    Il Sole 24 Ore

  • “The structure of this novel has a plural perspective, like that of Dos Passos (or another masterpiece of that era, such as Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.”

    “ttL”, La Stampa

  • “Documented material gathered with narrative intelligence.”

    Avvenire

  • “Janeczek applies the teachings of Walter Benjamin to photography and to the memory of the defeated. The result is a tight, fragmented and fascinating prose and a narrative structure that verges on being a masterpiece.” 

    L’Espresso

  • “An exciting portrait (…) that goes beyond the usual clichés of traditional biographies.”

    Marie Claire

  • “A single novel for a whole generation.”

    la Repubblica

  • “Helena is a real writer, attentive to the fable but obsessed with historical reality.”

    Roberto Saviano

  • “Ce livre est comme une planche-contact : si l’on s’y perd parfois, on y voit évoluer, dans les témoignages de ses amis, une jeune femme intrépide, passionnée, « agile comme un lévrier, résistante comme le cuir et parfois dure comme l’acier », séduisante et déterminée, silhouette émancipée au sourire lumineux, et dont les photos ont tout de même fini par révéler le talent.”

    Gilles Heuré, Télérama

  • “De ce tourbillon, finit par émerger la « valise mexicaine », pleine de négatifs de Capa et Taro, qui remit sur le devant de la scène photographique l’étourdissante Gerda.”

    Frédérique Fanchette, Libération

  • “Ce roman rend justice à cette jeune Allemande venue à Paris dans les années 1930 pour fuir le nazisme et ressuscite une époque bouillonnante où le monde s’apprête à basculer.”

    Femme Actuelle Senior

Rights Sold

Albania: Toena; Bulgaria: Paradox; Croatia: Ljevak; Denmark: Palomar; World English: Europa Editions; France: Actes Sud; Germany: Berlin Verlag; Iran: Aftabkaran (Persian); The Netherlands: De Bezige Bij; Poland: Prószyński Romania: Art; Russia: Knizhniki; World Spanish: Castilian/Tusquets, Catalan/Grup 62.

Helena Janeczek

Helena Janeczek was born in Munich in 1964 to a Jewish-Polish family. In 1983 she came to Italy, where she still lives. She is the author of a collection of poems in German and the novels Lezioni di tenebra (Mondadori 1997 – Premio Bagutta Opera Prima) republished by Guanda in 2011, Cibo (Mondadori 2002, republished by Guanda in 2019), Le rondini di Montecassino (The Swallows of Montecassino, Guanda 2010), finalist for the Premio Comisso and winner of the Premio Napoli, the Premio Sandro Onofri and the Premio Pisa. Her La ragazza con la Leica (The Girl with the Leica, 2018, over 180,000 copies sold) won the 2018 Strega Prize, the Bagutta Prize and the Premio Selezione Campiello.

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