Magdalena Schrefel receives Robert-Walser-Preis 2022

Author Magdalena Schrefel is awarded the Robert-Walser-Preis for her collection of short stories Brauchbare Menschen.

The jury states:

»With Brauchbare Menschen, Magdalena Schrefel presents twelve stories that testify to both her dramatic skills and her mastery of succinct storytelling. Thematically, she focuses on working people and on aspects that have rarely been dealt with in literature since the sociological impulses of the Neue Sachlichkeit. What is work and how does it affect people? Are they replaced by machines or even reduced to being machines themselves? What are useful people? What about the discarded, the untouchable, the nameless at the margins of the postmodern world of work? Their self-image is just as much at stake as the meaning and structure of work in general. Magdalena Schrefel develops sometimes profound, sometimes idiosyncratically poetic, always surprising, narratives with elegant dramaturgic acceleration and interlinking motifs to explore these existential questions, which testify to a political commitment, but are at the same time based on the autonomy of literature.«

Magdalena Schrefel, born in 1984, studied European Ethnology in Vienna and Creative Writing in Leipzig. Her play Ein Berg, viele premiered at Schauspiel Leipzig, was produced as a radio play by Bayerischer Rundfunk and awarded the Kleist Advancement Award 2020. Brauchbare Menschen is her first publication with Suhrkamp Verlag. 

The Robert-Walser-Preis, established in 1978, is awarded every two years to one French-language and one German-language work. Only literary prose debuts are eligible. The selection is made by an international jury of five critics, publicists and authors. The prize is endowed with CHF 20,000 per work and is sponsored by the Robert Walser Foundation Biel (Switzerland). This year’s French-language prize winner is Rémi David. Winners of previous years include Marianne Fritz, Thomas Hettche, Frédérique Clémençon, Elisa Shua Dusapin, Thilo Krause and Anne Pauly.

For more information please visit the author's Foreign Rights Website or contact the respective Rights Manager.