Clemens J. Setz is awarded Georg Büchner Prize 2021
News19.07.2021
© SUHRKAMP VERLAG
The German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the Büchner Prize 2021 to author Clemens J. Setz. The prize is endowed with 50,000 Euros and will be presented on November 6, 2021 in Darmstadt.
From the jury’s statement:
Clemens J. Setz, born in Graz in 1982, studied mathematics and German language and literature at the University of Graz from 2001 to 2009. Today he lives in Vienna. Clemens J. Setz is the author of novels, short stories, poems and plays. He also publishes on Twitter and translates from the English. He has received numerous awards for his works, including the Literature Prize of the City of Bremen (2010), the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair (2011), the Wilhelm Raabe Prize (2015) and the Kleist Prize (2020).
Setz published his debut novel Söhne und Planeten in 2007. It was quickly followed by his second novel, Die Frequenzen, in 2009 and the volume of short stories Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes in 2011, for which he received the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair. In 2012, he published the novel Indigo and in 2015 his highly acclaimed 1000-page work Die Stunde zwischen Frau und Gitarre – a kind of philosophical psychological thriller – for which he was awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Prize. Setz is also the author of the collection of poetry Die Vogelstraußtrompete (2014). Most recently, Suhrkamp Verlag has published Bot. Gespräch ohne Autor (2018), the collection of short stories Der Trost runder Dinge (2019) as well as Die Bienen und das Unsichtbare (2020), which deals with the results of a self-experiment in which Setz studied constructed languages such as Esperanto, Volapük or Blissymbolic.
About the Georg Büchner Prize:
The German Academy for Language and Literature has been awarding the Georg Büchner Prize to outstanding writers since 1951. It is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts and the City of Darmstadt. Past recipients include Max Frisch, Paul Celan, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Golo Mann, Thomas Bernhard, Uwe Johnson, Elias Canetti, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Friederike Mayröcker and many others.
From the jury’s statement:
»With Clemens J. Setz, the German Academy for Language and Literature honours a master wordsmith who in his novels and stories repeatedly explores the liminal spaces of being human. His sometimes disturbingly drastic style strikes the heart of our present because it follows a profoundly humanistic impulse. Clemens J. Setz combines this humanitarianism with an encyclopaedic knowledge and a wealth of poetic and linguistic imagination. With astonishing versatility, he demonstrates a radical contemporaneity that, book after book, attests to the beauty and obstinacy of great literature.«
Clemens J. Setz, born in Graz in 1982, studied mathematics and German language and literature at the University of Graz from 2001 to 2009. Today he lives in Vienna. Clemens J. Setz is the author of novels, short stories, poems and plays. He also publishes on Twitter and translates from the English. He has received numerous awards for his works, including the Literature Prize of the City of Bremen (2010), the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair (2011), the Wilhelm Raabe Prize (2015) and the Kleist Prize (2020).
Setz published his debut novel Söhne und Planeten in 2007. It was quickly followed by his second novel, Die Frequenzen, in 2009 and the volume of short stories Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes in 2011, for which he received the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair. In 2012, he published the novel Indigo and in 2015 his highly acclaimed 1000-page work Die Stunde zwischen Frau und Gitarre – a kind of philosophical psychological thriller – for which he was awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Prize. Setz is also the author of the collection of poetry Die Vogelstraußtrompete (2014). Most recently, Suhrkamp Verlag has published Bot. Gespräch ohne Autor (2018), the collection of short stories Der Trost runder Dinge (2019) as well as Die Bienen und das Unsichtbare (2020), which deals with the results of a self-experiment in which Setz studied constructed languages such as Esperanto, Volapük or Blissymbolic.
About the Georg Büchner Prize:
The German Academy for Language and Literature has been awarding the Georg Büchner Prize to outstanding writers since 1951. It is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts and the City of Darmstadt. Past recipients include Max Frisch, Paul Celan, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Golo Mann, Thomas Bernhard, Uwe Johnson, Elias Canetti, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Friederike Mayröcker and many others.
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