Clemens J. Setz longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023

We are delighted to announce that Clemens J. Setz’ has been longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023 with his novel Moons before the Landing.

From the German Book Prize website:
»Worms in the early twenties of the last century. Peter Bender, a former lieutenant pilot in the German Army, makes a name for himself as the founder of a new religious community and with the proclamation of the so-called Hollow World Theory: according to this theory, humanity does not live on, but inside a sphere, outside of which nothing exists. Bender’s flock stays small, but nevertheless he is sentenced to several months in prison for distributing inflammatory and blasphemous pamphlets. When word gets out that his wife was Jewish after the Nazis seize power, even his closest followers turn their backs on him. The Benders fall into poverty and the repressions against his wife become unbearable until the family is arrested and deported in 1942. Only Bender’s son survives the concentration camp.«

Clemens J. Setz’ has received numerous awards and recognitions for his works, most recently including the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 2021. Moons before the Landing was published in February 2023 and was nominated for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair. Italian rights have been sold to La Nave di Teseo.

The German Book Prize is awarded just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair to the German-language »Novel of the Year«. The Prize is intended to draw attention beyond national borders to authors writing in German, to reading and to the keynote medium of the book. The shortlist, comprising of 6 titles, will be announced on September 19, 2023. The German Book Prize, endowed with a total of 37,500 Euros to be split between the winner and runners-up, will be awarded to the winner on October 16 at Frankfurt Book Fair.

Selected Praise for Moons before the Landing:

»Setz’s observations conjure up a vivid picture of people, places, and situations, and he achieves the impressive feat of completely recreating the deranged mindset of his protagonist. His extraordinary prose style is clear, sophisticated, and elaborate – a joy to read!«
New Books in German

»There are few other writers able to create such fantastic interconnections of
the organic and the mechanical, the animate and the inanimate.«
Jutta Person, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Setz gifts readers a monumental novel.«
Florian Eichel, Die Zeit

»Through bold metaphors and synesthetic connections even the most everyday fragment of reality is presented as an exceptional case of individual perception.
Hardly any other writer of contemporary German-language literature has the ability to present this disarrangement of focus as suggestively as Setz.«
Richard Kämmerlings, Welt am Sonntag

»The illuminating thing about Clemens Setz’s new novel is that present and past are not brought into a state of mutual denunciation. The novel neither passes judgement nor draws its conclusions.
It observes and describes.«
Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»His aesthetics are so unique in German-language literature – and not just in this context –
that it would not be inappropriate to describe Clemens J. Setz using
any and all available superlatives one could think of.«
Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»One gets a sense of how much pleasure Setz has taken in exploring his main character, and how he expounds his crazy ideas without judging or making fun of them.«
Gerrit Bartels, Der Tagesspiegel

»In his brilliant novel Moons before the Landing,
Clemens J. Setz tells the story of a crazy man and evil times.«
Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau