Status: October 18, 2021 7:26 p.m.
Antje Rávik Strubel receives the German Book Prize 2021 for her novel “Blaue Frau”. The award is endowed with 25,000 euros. The novel is about a young woman’s escape from memories of being raped.
Antje Rávik Strubel receives the German Book Prize 2021. This was announced by the German Book Trade Association. Your book “Blaue Frau” was named the best German-language novel of the year. The prize is endowed with 25,000 euros.
The novel, published by S. Fischer, describes the escape of a young woman from her memories of a rape. The jury judged the author to treat the subject “with existential force and poetic precision”. “The story of female self-empowerment expands into a reflection on rival cultures of remembrance in Eastern and Western Europe and power gaps between the sexes.”
Jury convinced by “disturbing novel”
Strubel was born in Potsdam in 1974. She first trained as a bookseller and then studied psychology and literature in Potsdam and New York. She later lived in Sweden, among other places, before returning to Potsdam.
The “disturbing novel” convinced the jury: “In a tentative narrative movement, Antje Rávik Strubel succeeds in bringing up what is actually inexpressible in a traumatic experience. In dialogue with the mythical figure of the Blue Woman, the narrator condenses her poetic poetics: literature as fragile Countervailing power that opposes injustice and violence in spite of all despair. ”
Six authors were shortlisted
The other five authors on the shortlist will each receive 2500 euros. Three men and three women had made it to the final: In addition to Strubel, there were Norbert Gstrein (“The Second Jacob”), Christian Kracht (“Eurotrash”), Thomas Kunst (“Zandschower Klinken”), Mithu Sanyal (“Identitti”) and Monika Helfer (“Daddy”) on the shortlist for the book award.
Each book is “distinguished in its own way,” said jury spokesman Knut Cordsen after the shortlist was published. The books showed “the stylistic, formal and thematic richness of contemporary German-language literature”.