Shortly before the opening of the book fair, the German Book Prize was awarded in Frankfurt's Römer: to Inger-Maria Mahlke for the novel "Archipelago". The author, born in Hamburg in 1977, tells stories of the Spanish island of Tenerife. "Archipelago" is Mahlke's fourth novel, in 2015 she had been in the shortlist for the book prize with "Wie ihr wollt".

In "Archipelago" Inger-Maria Mahlke reviews the events on the Canary Island of Tenerife back to the year 1919 - the narrative peculiarity here: she presents them backwards, that is, from the present deeper and deeper into the past. (Read a review of the novel here.)

With the German Book Prize, the foundation of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels annually awards the German-language "Roman of the Year". Seven year-to-year jurors choose from among the books submitted by the publishers 20 for the longlist, six of which remain on the shortlist. The prize winner receives 25,000 euros, the other five authors of the shortlist each receive 2,500 euros.

The award-winning "novel of the year" has been published by Rowohlt-Verlag, for which there have been recent turbulences: Florian Ilies was announced as a future publisher, his predecessor Barbara Laugwitz was cast under unclear circumstances. Several authors of the publishing house had expressed their solidarity to Laugwitz. This was followed by Mahlke in her acceptance speech.

She expressly thanked Barbara Laugwitz for her dedication and her knowledge of the very fragile processes of author life and artistic production. (Learn more about Mahlke's way of working in the portrait) It makes a difference whether you sell books or yogurt, Mahlke said in her short speech. Literature offers "existential experiences" - even if in the meantime every second yoghurt is advertised in this way, that is nevertheless a domain of the art.

On the shortlist of six books, for the first time in the history of the German Book Prize, which was introduced in 2005, the authors were in the majority, with only two writers of male gender making it to the bottom six.

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German Book Prize: Four authors, two authors on the shortlist

The jury included Christoph Bartmann (director of the Goethe-Institut Warsaw), Luzia Braun (responsible for "The Literary Quartet" at the ZDF), Tanja Graf (director of the Literaturhaus Munich), Paul Jandl (literary critic of the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung") , Uwe Kalkowski (owner of the literature blog "Kaffeehaussitzer"), Marianne Sax (bookseller in Frauenfeld, Switzerland) and as jury spokeswoman Christine Lötscher (freelance critic and cultural scientist, currently at the FU Berlin).

In the previous year, the Austrian Robert Menasse was awarded the German Book Prize for his EU institutional novel "The Capital".