Durs Grünbein honoured with Zbigniew Herbert Literary Award 2020

We are pleased to announce that the Laureate of the Zbigniew Herbert Literary Award 2020 is poet and essayist Durs Grünbein.

Tomasz Różycki, poet and prose writer, juror of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, states in the jury’s rationale:

»Grünbein is presently one of the most famous and appreciated German language poets, not only because of the value of his enormous creative output, but also because of the scope of his interests and the initiatives he has undertaken over the years. Born in the former GDR, he describes the experiences of the grey days of the ›People’s Democracy‹, the grey streets of a war torn Dresden reduced to ashes, but also the colourful chaos and ambiguity of the present. His poems, a mix of various styles of expression, from the most metaphorical to the colloquial and striking, with their ruthless directness, often take on boldly modernized, though fundamentally classic, literary forms: elegy, ode, sonnet, epic poem, prose poem. Grünbein, whilst staying close to modern life, comes into contact with art and philosophy, as if he had as examples the German language’s great predecessors: Hölderlin, Novalis, and Goethe. His poems are dialogues with the great: Seneca, Pascal, and Descartes. He constantly subjects existence to the scrutiny of poetic analysis, re-erecting a once destroyed bridge, linking poetry and philosophy; best seen in the widely commented lengthy poem about Descartes, which in itself is something of a mechanism, a kind of poetic machine serving reflection. In this sense, Grünbein is also close to Zbigniew Herbert’s poetic tradition: universal culture is still a reference for him, a place where we all live, despite the passage of the years, changes in fashions and ways of communicating. It is also an inexhaustible store of questions that are still worth asking, a way of finding kinship in the face of a restless present. An element of permanence, something that, for a moment, allows us to forget about the time and space that divide us.«

The aim of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, established in Warsaw in 2013, is to recognize outstanding artistic and intellectual literary achievements on the world stage which have a bearing on the world of values towards which Zbigniew Herbert’s work gravitated. Former laureates include Agi Mishol, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Breyten Breytenbach, Charles Simic and W.S. Merwin.

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