Emine Sevgi Özdamar receives Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis 2022

We are delighted to share that Emine Sevgi Özdamar is the recipient of this year‘s Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis, endowed with 20,000 Euro and awarded by the arts and culture foundation of the Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf.
 

The jury's statement reads:

»With great poetic power, Emine Sevgi Özdamar explores the conditions of exile in her novel A Space Bounded by Shadows. What does it mean to lose one’s country as a young actress, to no longer have a language, having to find one’s way in a foreign land, tormented again and again by the pain of losing one’s home, friends and family? Özdamar unfolds the inner worlds of her first-person narrator, describes the conquest of a new aesthetic space and demonstrates her sense of the grotesque. In a very autonomous, gripping narrative style, she not only unravels a woman’s fascinating educational story and creates a dazzling ensemble of characters with a light hand, but also brings to life the theatre scene of the 1970s and 1980s in East Berlin, Paris, Bochum and Frankfurt. As dramatic as the entanglements are, Emine Sevgi Özdamar is equally adept at the comic. There are know-it-all crows as well as clairvoyant cats causing trouble. The settings of Paris, Berlin, Istanbul and a Turkish island become large-scale metaphors for life itself.«

The prize ceremony will be held on Monday, 30 May 2022, in Düsseldorf. The Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis recognises authors whose literary works reference other artistic field in content or form. So far, twenty authors have received this prize, including Patrick Roth, Thomas Kling, Katharina Hacker, Ursula Krechel, Marcel Beyer and Marion Poschmann.