literature
Lutz Seiler receives the Georg Büchner Prize
Lutz Seiler is awarded the Büchner Prize. photo
© Hendrik Schmidt/dpa
For the poet and storyteller Lutz Seiler, writing is always a new challenge. The 60-year-old has now received one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Germany for his work.
His Thuringian home is for the poet and novelist Lutz Seiler formative. “My origin story probably plays a pretty big role in what I write, i.e. origin from a Thuringian landscape devastated by uranium mining,” the writer told the German Press Agency on Tuesday. For his work, the 60-year-old received the renowned Georg Büchner Prize, which is endowed with 50,000 euros. This was announced by the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt.
The writer found out about the award just a week earlier. “I consider this award to be a great honor and an expression of great appreciation for what I do in writing.”
“In Lutz Seiler, the German Academy for Language and Poetry honors an author who began with sonorous volumes of poetry, from there he found storytelling, but always remains a clear and enigmatic, darkly glowing poet, most recently with “schrift für blinde riesen””, was the reason given by the jury. As a novelist and as a poet, Seiler has found his own unmistakable voice, melancholic, urgent, sincere, full of wonderful echoes from a long literary tradition.
There was already a prize for the debut novel
The award-winning Seiler also received the German Book Prize in 2014 for his debut novel “Kruso”. For his novel “Stern 111” he received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2020. He is interested in the processes of people’s self-development, the author describes his intention. “How does someone get their own voice, a self-determined life, or even various fascinations such as mechanics, radioactivity, knowledge acquisition, diffuse states of consciousness.” These are all aspects from which his ideas come.
According to his own statements, Seiler, who was born in Gera in 1963, only became aware of literature late. After training as a construction specialist in the GDR, he initially worked as a carpenter. He only started reading while he was in the army. “I became interested in literature relatively late, and then, while I was in the army, the experience of reading was so drastic and great that I immediately started to write.” First it was poetry, then essays, and that’s how he came to storytelling and finally to novels. “You could say there’s been a natural evolution across genres, and now it’s really nice that I can have it all.”
Prove again and again
For him, writing is not a sure-fire success. “It takes a lot of strength and is associated with a lot of doubts when you start something new. Basically, you don’t have the constant self-confidence that you can write, you have to prove it to yourself with every book,” said Seiler, who wrote in Halle studied history and German. Since 1994 he has been working as a freelance writer. The father of three adult children lives with his Swedish wife in Stockholm and in Wilhelmshorst in Brandenburg, where he directs the literary program at the Peter Huchel House.
For the director of the Frankfurt Literature House, Hauke Hückstädt, Seiler is the right choice. “With Lutz Seiler, the Darmstadt Academy honors one of our best poets and frequent guest of the literature houses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.” He has been one of the most important European poets since the early volumes of poetry, and since the novel “Kruso” he has also been one of the atmospheric narrators of event and microhistory.
He is to receive the Georg Büchner Prize on November 4th at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. The Academy has awarded it to writers who write in German since 1951. According to the statutes, the award winners must play a significant role in shaping contemporary German cultural life. The prize is financed by the federal government, the state of Hesse and the city of Darmstadt.
The winners include Max Frisch (1958), Günter Grass (1965) and Heinrich Böll (1967) and most recently Emine Sevgi Özdamar. It is named after the dramatist and revolutionary Georg Büchner (“Woyzeck”). He was born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1813 and died in Zurich in 1837.