Daughter Issues
Translated by Martha Turewicz
The Bachmann Prize is one of Germany’s most prestigious awards for the short story as well as its most voyeuristic literary spectacle. To give English readers a taste of what they might have missed at this year’s ceremonies, the Diasporist presents one of the entries, Daughter Issues by Nora Osagiobare (translated into English by Martha Turewicz). Osagiobare, born in Zurich in 1992, published her debut novel Daily Soap, a subtle satire on everyday racism in Switzerland, in 2025 with Kein&Aber.
After her text, readers can find an introduction to the Bachmann Prize and a translated excerpt of the jury deliberations.
TONS OF GIRLS HAVE DEADBEAT DADS. They forget birthdays, live at the office, and spend their weekends at the bar. Some of them really do “go out for cigarettes” and never come back.
What would happen if we offered the average dad a million to break off all contact with his daughter, forever? Would he finally realize how much he really loves his little princess, or would he take the money and run?
Find out on “Daddy Issues: The Worst Dads in the World.”
Finally, I take a deep breath and cap off my presentation with a freshly bleached smile. The five men sitting around the conference table look to me like guard dogs at rest. I know how to read silence in a room. So I also know that I’ve just pitched the next hit reality show.
Just then, the intern knocks meekly on the door, opens it a crack, and whispers, at a level just over a mumble, that someone’s called for me and it seems urgent. I respond firmly:
“It can wait, I’m in the middle of something very important.”
The intern nods and disappears as discreetly as he arrived. When I glance over at Jürg, he quickly looks down at the ground and clears his throat.
“It’ll only be one episode long if we just give the dads an ultimatum.”
“We’ll follow the father/daughter duos over a longer period of time. We’ll tell them they’re competing to win a million by being the best dad out of a group of five.”
Jürg makes the tiny motion with his head that indicates growing approval, and I let my shoulders drop a few millimeters.
“Then, once the dads have really made an effort for their daughters, we’ll reveal the actual concept of the show. That will make their decisions even more dramatic for viewers.”
The room is silent. I’ve put all my cards on the table. Finally, Jürg gives a clear nod, still looking down at the ground.
“This is good. Put a team together and set up a timeline for the next Thursday meeting.”
Suddenly, a wave of exhaustion crashes over me, followed by a wave of dizzying nerves, ebbing and flowing. It’s 9:30 am on a Thursday, but I’ll start the weekend early by getting wasted with Diana — I’ve earned it. As I return to my seat, I try in vain to hide my beaming face. I don’t catch a single word of the rest of the meeting.
I also try to hide my glee from Diana, since she’s heartbroken again. She’d probably only seen the guy she’s moping over three times, tops.
“What should I do, Odin? I can’t help it.”
Diana downs half a glass of Prosecco with one hand, while the other frantically flicks her Parisienne Ciel. It’s 11:30, and I’m slurping a fat oyster out of its shell. Diana starts to cry.
“I just don’t know…”
She lets out a dramatic sob and wipes her little nose with the back of her hand.
“I actually had a really nice childhood. But…”
She pulls a napkin soggy with melted ice from the oyster shells out from under a slice of lemon and blows her nose.
“My dad could really be an asshole sometimes.”
“Mm-hm.”
Diana types on her phone. I catch the waiter’s eye and indicate my empty glass — smiling, like I always do, as naturally as possible, to show that I’m not some out-of-touch snob.
“How do you even know the guy?”
“It’s Philip. Your intern.”
“That’s still going on?”
“I guess not if he doesn’t write me back.”
“You’re robbing the cradle again.”
“He’s twenty-seven.”
The waiter returns with the bottle and pours each of us a glass. Diana lights another cigarette and chokes on the smoke. Once, when she was in a blackout, she grabbed my wrist, looked dead in my eye and said she’d probably die of lung cancer, or suicide over a man. Diana is such a dumbass sometimes.
“So what’s new with you? Are you seeing anyone?”
“If we were on a TV show right now, we’d totally fail the Bechdel test.”
“The what?”
“Nothing.”
I’m drunk, and suddenly the happiness I felt after I nailed my pitch is gone. I suggest that we order another bottle. Diana nods, looking tired.
“Do you have anything on you?”
“Nope.”
She looks at me conspiratorially and smiles, for the first time.
“Should we?”
Now I’m grinning, too. Sometimes I ask myself if I only like Diana because I can freely indulge in vices with her.
“They’re going ahead with the show, by the way.”
Diana doesn’t look up from her phone. As I wait for her to put it away, so that I can then repeat myself, I feel like an idiot.
“What?”
“The show. With the dads. They want to go ahead with it.”
Diana looks at me, blank-faced, and nibbles on a fake nail.
I pour some more Prosecco and explain the concept of “Daddy Issues” to her again — I came up with it when we were both wasted, and she thought it was wild at the time.
Diana shrieks and lifts up her hands, then pinches my arm. “You’re kidding, right?”
I shake my head and start to tear up. I’m a little surprised by how excited she is, but then I remember that the coke is on its way and I smile to myself.
“So, what’s up with Philip?”
I lean my elbows against the top of the flimsy folding table, and it tips over a little so our Prosecco glasses almost go flying off. Diana and I burst out laughing, then reach out to hold hands. Her fingers are icy and smell like cigarettes. We order Negronis.
“He’s got an asshole fetish.”
“I guess that makes two of you.”
Diana laughs like a hyena, and her knee suddenly pops up like somebody pulled it on a string and it hits the bottom of the table and for a second we think she’s definitely knocked it over and we freeze until we realize that once again, it’s fine, and everything on our table falls back into place, which sends us off into a laughing fit, so everyone around us stares.
Right at that moment, Marco appears at our table. He’s blond, with a fresh haircut, and he smells clean. I don’t know why, but men straight out of the shower have such a hold on me — all I want to do is press up against their chests and bury my nose in their armpits, rubbing myself against them and purring like a cat in heat.
I say all that to Marco, and Diana cackles.
“And you wonder why you’re still single.”
“Never,” I say, and I laugh, too.
I look over at Marco, but he’s making a face like he’s waiting to finish babysitting two little girls so he can get back to being a serious grown-up. I ask myself if Marco would sleep with me if I offered to.
“How much do you want?”
“One, right?”
Diana looks at me inquiringly, and I nod. What was she thinking — two? It’s noon on a Thursday, for Christ’s sake. I sold a TV show; I didn’t win an Oscar.
“We can’t do it here. One of you has to come with me.”
Marco gestures with his chin at the street corner behind me, and I jump up. This time, we don’t laugh as the table pops up into the air. Marco walks fast. As I hurry behind him, I feel like his lame little sister.
“They’re going to make my show! You’ll see ads for it everywhere soon. It’s called Daddy Issues.”
“Congrats.”
We go around the corner, past a couple of Uber Eats delivery guys out on a smoke break. One of them checks me out from top to bottom. Marco doesn’t seem to notice.
“What’s your show about?”
“Oh, I thought you’d never ask.”
I grin at him and he curls his thin lips into something like a smile as he pulls me by the sleeve of my blazer into a courtyard. For a second, I cringe.
“It’s about bad dads. We offer them a million to cut off contact with their daughters forever.”
“Who’s we?”
“The network.”
“That’s really fucked up.”
I stare at the ground, silent, as he stands there, digging around in his pants pocket.
“Is that even legal?”
“What do you mean?”
“Preventing dads from contacting their daughters. If they haven’t committed a crime.”
“No. And that’s not what it is. They have to sign a binding agreement beforehand to play by the rules.”
Marco looks at me, shocked, holding the white baggie in his right fist. I’m dying to pee.
“What kind of stupid shit is that? That’s what you do for work?”
“Um, you’re a drug dealer.”
I laugh, then realize how fake it just sounded. I’m such a loser — what’s wrong with me? Didn’t I want to stop taking drugs? They’re killing off all my brain cells.
“Here.”
Marco presses the baggie into my hand. It’s damp from his palm. Now he looks deep into my eyes and smiles. For a second I think he’s about to kiss me, but it’s nothing like that. I rummage around awkwardly for my wallet, pull out the 100-franc bill that I withdrew that morning before the pitch, fold it into a thick square and hold it out to Marco, who pulls it from my hand like he’s taking it from an ATM. As always, I stick the baggie into the bottom slot of my wallet so that I’ll know where it is even if I’m completely trashed.
“Okay then, see you.”
He’s already almost out on the street, so he can’t hear me croak, “You, too.”
So embarrassing. I’m so incredibly embarrassing. I need to go blow lines with Diana. Stat.
When I get back, there’s a guy sitting across from her. I stand at the edge of the table, where Marco just was, and my legs suddenly go heavy, and it feels like I’m looking at Diana through a trippy kaleidoscope.
“What took you so long?”
“Hey, Odin.”
“Hey, Philip.”
I totally forgot how desperate Diana gets. She can’t go a single second without male attention. Unless she has drugs, but she hasn’t had any yet. What she really needs is patience.
I took Diana as my plus one to an award ceremony once, and she was super excited that all these celebrities were coming, so she drank a bottle of Prosecco on her own beforehand and fell flat on her ass on the red carpet. Then she hid in the bathroom and reappeared an hour later with her eyes all puffy from sobbing, and then she up and left with Philip without saying a word to me.
I rush off to the bathroom, but when I get to the door I realize I don’t have my wallet. I have to go all the way back, even though it’ll be extremely conspicuous.
“Can you pass me my bag? It’s under your chair.”
As Philip leans down to grab it, I think about how he’s actually in my chair, but I don’t say anything, and start to dig through my bag for my wallet. Diana could have any guy she wanted, even a loaded Saudi prince — one actually proposed to her when he was in Zurich with his family on vacation, and Diana seriously considered accepting and moving with him to Riyadh, until someone explained to her how women are treated in Saudi Arabia. Diana definitely doesn’t keep up with the news; she only watches trash on TV.
“What are you looking for in there?”
“She’s not listening.”
I fall to my knees so I can pile up the things from my bag on the ground. At some point, I realize with relief that the two of them have found something else to talk about, and that I’m not looking for my wallet anymore at all, but instead randomly taking things out and scrabbling around in the soft suede of my bag because I’m stressed out and scared that someone could be watching me and seeing how pathetic I am. On top of that, I start to feel really sick when I see a man walk by who looks like my dad. He stares at me for ages as though he can see right through me, and what I’m doing: being a stupid cokehead bitch.
“Should we head out?”
“Yeah, in a second.”
Before the award ceremony, I’d partied for 48 hours straight again, then gone to my dad’s. I still remember how sadly he looked at me as I babbled a load of total nonsense at him; it came pouring out of my dry mouth. I didn’t realize until later that it was his birthday. Then I holed myself up in my apartment for an entire week and only went out once, to get cigarettes. When my dad suddenly showed up at my door, my serotonin level was at an all-time low. The way he looked at me weighed on me like a heavy backpack that I wanted to take off as fast as possible. I never would have invited him in, but with the authority that only a dad can have, he pushed past me through the door and sat down at the table.
“Why not now?”
“We can’t just leave Odin here.”
I stood a safe distance away from him, and had to take a moment to process the scene in front of me, assembling it from my dim senses into reality. Meanwhile, my heart was pounding in my chest like a manic raver.
I can’t remember exactly what we said to each other, just that at some point I said, you don’t get it, it’s a different culture, everyone does it here, and then he raised his voice for the first time ever. He screamed, do you think I’m stupid, I can see full well what’s going on, and I told him to fuck off, fuck off, I don’t want you here, nobody wants you here, you don’t realize anything at all, you were even too dumb to realize that mom was cheating on you for years with another guy from your country, ten years younger than you and fresh as an imported mango, a bit green, but still juicy, and definitely not as soft as you.
“You’d be doing her a favor if you called her a cab.”
At that point his chestnut-brown eyes filled with tears and the left side of his mouth twitched, but otherwise his face didn’t change. He looked right into my eyes, unlike Jürg, who can’t even look into the eyes of the young women he wants to fuck, not even the ones who jack him off over his lunch break — no, my dad is the kind of guy who looks other people right in the face, in the eyes, in the soul, which is why he’s always so quick to start crying, like a little girl. His fat tears fell onto the tabletop, mixing with my cigarette ashes to form sad gray designs.
“Seriously, what is she looking for in there?”
“Her standards, maybe.”
Diana and her boy burst into laughter, as though it had been the two of them getting drunk all day together, and not me and Diana. My feeling of shame turns to anger.
“That’s rich coming from the ones with an asshole fetish.”
They stop laughing. Diana looks down at me and furrows her forehead. Across the street, my dad is leaning against the front of a building, smoking, and he keeps looking over at me.
The thing about my dad is that people could do the meanest things ever to him and he’d never stoop to the same level. My mother is actually an unbearable person — she finds out exactly where other people’s weaknesses lie, then drives her pink gel nails right into those soft spots; for whatever reason, she just loves it. But my dad has never had a bad thing to say about her. Instead, he suffered like a guard dog that had to watch, chained up and helpless, as intruders raided his house.
“Why did you ignore my calls?”
The absolute worst was when my mother brought her new guy home and made my dad sleep in the guest room. That was around the time I started partying every weekend. Once, I staggered home in the middle of the day and my dad was sitting alone at the kitchen table while the two of them were going at it, full volume. They hadn’t even shut the bedroom door.
I throw up right at Diana’s feet, but the dumbass doesn’t even notice, just starts screeching away again when Philip says the kind of thing a 12-year-old would say, about Paw Patrol or something.
That makes me laugh, and then I notice a weird little weight in the right-hand pocket of my blazer sagging down to the ground, and I reach for it. I can be so stupid, truly.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?”
As if through a veil I see how Philip lays his hand on Diana’s bare knee and strokes it. I shove the table. Diana screams, then there’s an eerie silence. I stand up and wipe imaginary dirt from my butt, wobble off into the bar.
In the bathroom, I take an epic pee. Then I cut two lines to sober up, and the bitter taste in my throat makes me throw up again, as someone pounds with both fists on the door.
When I was still pretty young, my dad and I watched Mrs. Doubtfire. My dad had already fallen asleep when I shook his shoulder and asked, if mom left you, would you go back to Nigeria? My dad smiled at me in a tired way and said no, princess, not even for a million francs, and kissed me on the forehead.
I look surprisingly good considering how much I’ve had to drink and how little I slept — my skin is glowing, in a healthy, not an oily, way, and my eyeshadow is on fleek. I wet my hands in the sink and smooth down the frizz at the top of my head, rinse out my mouth, and cut another line.
“There has never been as much cocaine use in Europe as there is right now.”
The idyllic setting in which German-language literature comes into its own — this might be one way to explain to the non-German world what takes place every year at the beginning of summer in Klagenfurt, Austria, on the tranquil shores of Lake Wörthersee. During the Festival of German-Language Literature, 14 authors read their work aloud to compete for a variety of awards, including the prestigious Bachmann Prize, endowed with a total of 62,500 EUR.
The abysmal fascination surrounding the prize and the allure that makes it a voyeuristic spectacle for those even only remotely interested in literature can be explained by the structure in which it is held: The authors read before a jury of seven literary critics who then discuss the texts in front of an audience, all of which is live-streamed.
The result is a four-day live television broadcast, a kind of The Apprentice for literary scholars, a Shark Tank for authors and their texts — which is why the attention often falls less on the texts themselves than on the jury’s deliberations. It is their comments, their critiques, their debates, and their disagreements which make the rounds on social media. “This is not literature,” “a trivial text” — that’s the “You’re fired!” of the televised literary jury.
As unforgiving as the format is, the discussions about the texts are sometimes just as brutal. But over the years, the festival has become an initiation ritual of sorts. Since its inception in 1977, the Klagenfurt ‘competition’ has succeeded in transforming a selection of voices from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland into “vintages.” Those who survive the trial by fire of the Klagenfurt Arena and are not put off writing entirely will most likely continue to publish and, if they have not already done so, make names for themselves in the future.
Leif Randt, Lutz Seiler, and Jenny Erpenbeck have all read their texts in Klagenfurt. Those who know German literature primarily in translation and have been wondering for several years now where to find the new W.G. Sebald — this is where they might discover them.
– Ron Mieczkowski, Contributing Editor
Nora Osagiobare read at the festival by invitation of Swiss juror Thomas Strässle. The discussion of Daughter Issues followed an unusual pattern:
Klaus Kastberger: This is a winning text, and that’s immediately clear when you hear it. […] It’s incredibly lively, it’s contemporary, it’s topical, it’s set in today’s media landscape. In my opinion, there’s not a single word out of place in this text, not a single word that doesn’t fit.
[…]
Philipp Tingler: In places, the text struck me as if it were three to five years old. Certain motifs such as drug use, drastic physicality, and the underlying neediness – these are all motifs that embody a certain literary style that is already on the wane again. […] It’s just not precise enough for me. Somehow, it doesn’t quite work. It ticks stylistic boxes but I don’t think enough work has gone into it.
Thomas Strässle: Well, if you quote the infamous “cigarettes” here as an example, that’s text in italics, that’s what the character says in the pitch. It’s basically advertising copy. And we all know that when …
Tingler: Yes, I thought you would say that. But then it’s not right either, because nobody would formulate a pitch like that today.
Strässle: Okay, then I surrender to Philipp Tingler’s extensive pitching experience. Of course, the text is referencing advertising language.
Tingler: No, no! That’s not how it is! The text isn’t referencing the language correctly! That’s not the language of this milieu […]
Mara Delius: Mr. Tingler’s point is absolutely right. […] Some images that, compared to the images that come later, are simply not particularly successful. “I urgently need to go to the bathroom.” It’s all a bit…
Strässle: I also need to go to the bathroom urgently.
Delius: The question is, very briefly, whether these clichés are important upfront in order to allow the later indirect portrait to come across. That would be my question about the text.
Strässle: Yes, and maybe this isn’t a text that wants to strike this very high, sublime literary tone, but maybe it’s all a satire on the advertising industry, on all these characters who are clearly exaggerated, as you’ve already said.
Tingler: Yes, but then it has to work, especially as satire.
Strässle: It works excellently.
[…]
Kastberger: I can only partially understand these objections, some of which are on a very, very high level. So, to say that a text is out of date because it’s three to five years old, okay, fair enough. We have texts here that give the impression they were written 30 or 50 years ago. So, three years, five years. For me, that’s just about acceptable in order to be current. […] So, you can still read the text tomorrow. […] I don’t know why people are complaining so much about the text. It’s a mystery to me.
[…]
Tingler: I just wanted to say again quickly that I don’t believe that topicality is a mark of literary quality. I just wanted to point out that there are, of course, literary fashions and that certain modules, thematic and stylistic set pieces in this text remind me of literary fashions. In that respect, this text has a bit of a “paint by numbers” feel to it for me.
Laura de Weck: […] What is it actually about? It’s about the clichéd image of fathers and how this image of the father is portrayed. It is first shown through these “reality pitch glasses,” and then we see the real father. […] And again, on the subject of fashion, what is currently in vogue: there has never been as much cocaine use in Europe as there is now.
[…]
Sanyal: I think it’s basically good when we disagree, because it’s always bad when everyone agrees too much about a text. But I think a sentence like “It’s paint by numbers” needs to be substantiated in the text.
Tingler: I always substantiate my judgments.
[…]
Strässle: But the point that Mithu Sanyal has just made is true. […] “Paint by numbers” – so far in this text: not a single set of numbers.
The original text by Nora Osagiobare, the filmed reading, the author’s introduction, and the jury deliberation are all available here.