Heike Geißler Wins the Heinrich Böll Prize 2025
News27.10.2025
Suhrkamp author Heike Geißler has been awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize of the City of Cologne. A jury overseen by Mayor Henriette Reker decided to honour the novelist and essayist, with the €30,000 cash prize to be presented at a ceremony in early 2026.
In the jury’s public remarks, Professor Kathrin Röggla had the following to say about their decision: »Perhaps more than any other contemporary German author, Heike Geißler explores the question of precarious working conditions. Born in the East German city of Riesa in 1977, Geißler has been publishing work since 2002, exploring this thematic area in numerous volumes of prose and essays, producing a varied body of work in which she deploys a range of literary techniques – including humour, musicality, documentary research, and self-interrogation – to show how literature can confront the societal imperative for optimisation, increased efficiency, and constant productivity with relish and empathy, in subversive and unexpected ways. She does all this while making historical space perceptible, drawing lines from history whose continuities and discontinuities play a part in constructing the space of domination that defines everyone’s existence in one way or another. As such, her work is very much in keeping with the legacy of Heinrich Böll.«
The Heinrich Böll Prize is awarded biennially, with previous winners including Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Weiss.
In the jury’s public remarks, Professor Kathrin Röggla had the following to say about their decision: »Perhaps more than any other contemporary German author, Heike Geißler explores the question of precarious working conditions. Born in the East German city of Riesa in 1977, Geißler has been publishing work since 2002, exploring this thematic area in numerous volumes of prose and essays, producing a varied body of work in which she deploys a range of literary techniques – including humour, musicality, documentary research, and self-interrogation – to show how literature can confront the societal imperative for optimisation, increased efficiency, and constant productivity with relish and empathy, in subversive and unexpected ways. She does all this while making historical space perceptible, drawing lines from history whose continuities and discontinuities play a part in constructing the space of domination that defines everyone’s existence in one way or another. As such, her work is very much in keeping with the legacy of Heinrich Böll.«
The Heinrich Böll Prize is awarded biennially, with previous winners including Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Weiss.