Winner $41,000 German Book Prize to be revealed in Frankfurt

 

By Jenny Tobien, dpa I Monday, October 14, 2024

 

 

FRANKFURT – The winner of the 2024 German Book Prize is due to be announced in the western city of Frankfurt on Monday.

Six novels are in the running for the coveted German-language literature prize, dealing with recent history, war, violence and love.

The ceremony in Frankfurt’s city hall begins at 6 pm (1600 GMT) and the winner will be announced by 7 pm at the latest. The prize is to be presented for the 20th time this year. The seven-member jury scrutinized a total of 197 novels from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The award, handed out by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, carries prize money totalling €37,500 ($41,000), with the winner receiving €25,000 and the other shortlisted authors €2,500 each.

Last year’s winner was Austrian author Tonio Schachinger with his coming-of-age novel “Echtzeitalter” (“Real Age”).

This year’s shortlist

On the shortlist this year are authors Martina Hefter, Maren Kames, Clemens Meyer, Ronya Othmann, Markus Thielemann and Iris Wolff.

Meyer’s work “Die Projektoren” (“The Projectionists”) is about the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but also highlights German-produced Wild West films that were shot in what is now Croatia in the 1960s.

Wolff embeds her novel “Lichtungen” (“Clearings”) in European history at the end of the 20th century, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Like the author, the two main characters come from the Transylvania region of Romania and experience the upheaval in very different ways.

In “Vierundsiebzig” (“74”), Othmann focuses on the genocide committed by the Islamic State terrorist group against the Yazidi religious community in Iraq.

Thielemann’s second novel “Von Norden rollt ein Donner” (“Thunder Rolls from the North”) is about wolf attacks on sheep and an almost forgotten concentration camp.
“Hasenprosa” (“Hare Prose”) by Maren Kames is a bizarre literary journey about a rabbit who, according to the jury, behaves like “a cross between an anarchist and a petty accountant.”

In “Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?” (“Hey, Good Morning, How Are You?”), Hefter tells the story of a performance artist who develops a real relationship with an online love scammer.