Marcel Beyer awarded Georg Büchner Prize 2016

The German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the 2016 Georg Büchner Prize to writer Marcel Beyer. The prize is endowed with 50.000 Euros and is awarded on November 5, 2016 in Darmstadt.

The statement of the jury: »The German Academy for Language and Literature awards the Georg Büchner Prize 2016 to Marcel Beyer. Thereby it honors an author who mastered not only the epic panorama but also the poetic microscopy. Whether poem or novel, time diagnostic essay or opera libretto: for Marcel Beyer language always means exploring. He is dedicated to the realization of German history with the same precision as with which he explores the world of animals and plants. His texts are bold and tender, insightful and incorruptible. During three decades a work emerged, which makes the world seem wonderfully familiar and also iridescently new at once.«

Marcel Beyer, born on November 23, 1965, lived in Cologne before moving to Dresden in 1996. He studied literature and graduated in 1992 with a thesis on Friederike Mayröcker.
In 1991 he debuted as a novelist with the book Menschenfleisch, published in the same year as his first book of poems under the title Walkmännin. Beyer gained public and even international recognition in 1995 with his novel Flughunde, in which he talks about World War II, the instrumentalization of language by propaganda and about experiments with human voices. This was followed by the poetry collections Falsches Futter (1997) and Erdkunde (2002) and the novels Spione (2000) and Kaltenburg (2008). Beyer again makes the presence of the past visible and shows how one can »translate« science into literature (Kaltenburg). He also published stories, essays as Nonfiction (2003) and Putins Briefkasten (2012). In 2014 Marcel Beyer presented his book of poems Graphit, which is a collection of poems that accumulated over a period of twelve years, in which he further continues his explorations of language, landscapes and cultures.

For his work he has received numerous awards: the Uwe Johnson Prize in 1997 and the Joseph Breitbach Prize in 2008. In recent years more followed: the Oskar Pastior Prize and Kleist Prize in 2014, the Bremen Literature Prize in 2015 and the Düsseldorf Literature Prize in 2016, among others.

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