On Tuesday, the jury announced which eight titles would be in the running for the German Non-Fiction Prize 2024. To make their selection, the seven-member group looked at 225 books from 115 publishers, all of which have been published since April 2023. According to jury spokesman Stefan Koldehoff, they were guided by the question of which books might provide answers “to the pressing questions of the present as well as to the timeless ones?” And: “Despite all the diversity of possible topics, a good non-fiction book ultimately always needs to have a connection to the present. Then it is relevant.”
The jury found all of this in these books: Ruth Hoffmann: “The German alibi. The ‘Stauffenberg assassination’ myth – how July 20, 1944 is glorified and politically exploited”; Roman Köster: “Garbage. A dirty history of humanity”; Jens Beckert: “Sold future. Why the fight against climate change threatens to fail” and Sebastian Conrad: “The Queen. Nefertiti’s global career.”
Christina Morina: “A thousand departures. The Germans and their democracy since the 1980s”; Frauke Rostalski: “The vulnerable society. The new vulnerability as a challenge to freedom”. Also Marcus Willaschek: “Kant. The Revolution of Thought” and Moshe Zimmermann: “Never Peace? Israel at a Crossroads”.
Last year, Ewald Frie won with a book about the end of rural life
In addition to Stefan Koldehoff, a journalist at Deutschlandfunk, the jury also includes Time-Journalist Sibylle Anderl, the cultural scientist Julika Griem, the professor of economic research Michael Hagner (ETH Zurich), Michael Lemling from the Lehmkuhl bookstore in Munich, Patricia Rahemipour from the Institute for Museum Research, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and the biologist Katrin Vohland from the Natural History Museum Vienna.
The German Non-Fiction Prize is awarded for the fourth time by the Book Culture and Reading Promotion Foundation of the Börsenverein and is endowed with a total of 42,500 euros. The winner receives 25,000 euros, the other nominees each receive 2,500 euros. The award ceremony will take place on June 11, 2024 in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. In 2023, the winner was the memoir “A Farm and Eleven Siblings,” in which the historian Ewald Frie writes about the end of farming life and structural change.