Antje Rávik Strubel receives the German Book Prize 2021. This was announced by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels on this Monday evening in Frankfurt.
Your book “Blaue Frau” was named the best German-language novel of the year.
The prize is endowed with 25,000 euros.
The novel, published by S. Fischer, describes the escape of a young woman from her memories of a rape.
The author treats the topic “with existential force and poetic precision”, judged the jury.
"The story of female self-empowerment expands into a reflection on rival cultures of remembrance in Eastern and Western Europe and power gaps between the sexes."
Strubel was born in Potsdam in 1974.
She first trained as a bookseller and then studied psychology and literature in Potsdam and New York.
She later lived in Sweden, among other places, before returning to Potsdam.
The “stirring novel” convinced the jury: “In a tentative narrative movement, Antje Rávik Strubel succeeds in bringing up what is actually inexpressible in a traumatic experience.
In a dialogue with the mythical figure of the Blue Woman, the narrator condenses her intervening poetics: literature as a fragile countervailing power that opposes injustice and violence in spite of all despair. "
The other five authors on the shortlist will each receive 2500 euros.
Three men and three women had made it to the final: In addition to Strubel, there were Norbert Gstrein (“The Second Jacob”), Christian Kracht (“Eurotrash”), Thomas Kunst (“Zandschower Klinken”), Mithu Sanyal (“Identitti”) and Monika Helfer ("Daddy") on the shortlist for the book award.
Each book is “distinguished in its own way,” said jury spokesman Knut Cordsen after the shortlist was published.
Her books showed "the stylistic, formal and thematic richness of contemporary German-language literature".