The writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar will receive the Georg Büchner Prize 2022. The prize is endowed with 50,000 euros and will be awarded on November 5, 2022 in Darmstadt.
This was announced by the German Academy for Language and Poetry on Tuesday.
The prize is considered the most important literary award in Germany.
With Emine Sevgi Özdamar, the German Academy for Language and Poetry honors "an outstanding author to whom the German language and literature owes new horizons, themes and a highly poetic sound," writes the jury.
“Once she came to divided Berlin from Turkey, Özdamar has been enriching the German-language literary scene for over three decades with her novels, short stories and plays, most recently with the magnum opus 'A Space Delimited by Shadows'.
Unfamiliar literary stylistic devices and Turkish-inspired ways of speaking characterize her multi-perspective texts, which, in addition to intimate personal experiences, unfold a broad panorama of German-Turkish history − from the First World War to the spirit of optimism in the 1960s and 1970s to the present day.
Since 1951, the Academy has given the award to writers who write in German.
The award winners must "stand out to a special degree through their works and works" and "have made a significant contribution to shaping current German cultural life".
The winners include Max Frisch (1958), Günter Grass (1965) and Heinrich Böll (1967) and most recently since 2015 Rainald Goetz, Marcel Beyer, Jan Wagner, Terézia Mora, Lukas Bärfuss, Elke Erb and last year Clemens J. Setz .
It is named after the playwright and revolutionary Georg Büchner (“Woyzeck”).
He was born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1813 and died in Zurich in 1837.