Author Oswald Egger wins Georg Büchner Prize for literature

 

It is everything you could wish for. I am very hard-working and don’t see this as the end of what I do, rather as a driving force

 

Admin I Sunday, Nov. 03, 2024

 

BERLIN – Oswald Egger has been awarded the annual Georg Büchner Prize, one of the most important literary awards in the German-speaking world.

“It is everything you could wish for,” Egger said before the award ceremony Saturday at the Staatstheater in Darmstadt.

“I am very hard-working and don’t see this as the end of what I do, rather as a driving force,” added Egger.

“With Oswald Egger, the German Academy for Language and Literature honours a writer who has been crossing and expanding the boundaries of literary production since his first publication in 1993,” the jury said when announcing the winner.

The author, who was born in Meran in South Tyrol, studied literature and philosophy in Vienna and currently lives in North Rhine Westphalia in western Germany.

Literature radicalised again

“Oswald Egger deserves the Büchner Prize because he is radicalising a certain idea of literature again,” literary critic Paul Jandl said in his laudatory speech.

“What distinguishes the work of the Büchner Prize winner from much of literature: He does not tell of a beginning towards an end,” Jandl

added.

Since 1951, the Academy has awarded the prize to writers who write in German. The winner currently receives €50,000 ($56,000).

Prizewinners must “stand out in particular for their works and achievements” and “play a significant role in shaping contemporary German cultural life.”

The prize is financed by the federal government, the state of Hesse and the city of Darmstadt.

 

Big-name former prizewinners

Max Frisch (1958), Günter Grass (1965) and Heinrich Böll (1967) are among previous prizewinners.

The prize is named after the playwright and revolutionary Georg Büchner, who was born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1813 and died in Zurich in 1837.