This year, the Georg Büchner Prize will be awarded to the poet and novelist Lutz Seiler. According to the jury of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, Seiler has found his own unmistakable voice as a novelist and as a poet: melancholic, urgent, sincere, full of wonderful echoes from a long literary tradition.
Born in Gera in 1963, Seiler grew up in East Thuringia and, after completing an apprenticeship as a construction worker, worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. After studying history and German in Halle, he went to Berlin in 1990 and has been working as a freelance writer since 1994.
He made his debut with poetry, and in 2007 he was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for the story “Turksib”. In 2014 he received the German Book Prize for his first novel “Kruso”. His fifth volume of poetry, “schrift für blinde riesen”, was recently published by Suhrkamp Verlag.
The Georg Büchner Prize is awarded to a writer every year by the German Academy for Language and Poetry. The members of a jury can nominate writers for the prize “who write in German, who have made a special contribution to their work and works and who have made a significant contribution to shaping contemporary German cultural life.” It is endowed with 50,000 euros.