The German Book Prize has published its selection of the six best novels. With Térezia Mora, who already won the prize for her novel “The Ungeheuer”, and the Austrian writer Tonio Schachinger, who is now on the list with his educational novel of a gamer, two authors are on the shortlist for the second time. Necati Öziri’s novel “Father’s Mark”, Anne Rabe’s East German violent story “The Possibility of Happiness”, Sylvie Schenk’s exploration of origins “Maman” and Ulrike Sterblich’s novel “Drifter” are also still in the running for Germany’s best-selling literary prize.
The motif of multilingualism is striking: neither Térézia Mora, who was born in Hungary, nor Sylvie Schenk, who was born in France, is German. Schenk was already publishing in French before she began writing her concise, focused, autobiographical novels in German. And Necati Öziri was born in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988, but his debut novel is about an absent Turkish father. The list depicts a literary landscape in which contemporary German arises primarily from contact with other languages and is refined by authors who first had to consciously develop it.
At first glance, the novels have nothing to do with each other, said the literary critic and jury speaker Katharina Teutsch, but if you put them next to each other, they inevitably start talking to each other, and this conversation is about our influences, “about upbringing and social background, political ideologies, dramatic system changes and the hardships of migration – everything that defines and challenges our present.
The German Book Prize will be awarded on October 16th at the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair and is endowed with 25,000 euros.