Oswald Egger Receives the Georg Büchner Prize for 2024
News23.07.2024
The German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the Georg Büchner Prize 2024 to Suhrkamp author Oswald Egger.
In a public statement, the jury remarked that in awarding the prize to Egger, the »German Academy for Language and Literature is honouring a writer who has been transcending and expanding the boundaries of literary production ever since his first publication in 1993. He has created a continuum of works that figures language as movement, as sound, as texture, as image, and as performance, and actively responds to the way that language is constantly shifting through writing and everyday use. His prose poems and loosely woven texts defy any desire for quick and superficial reading, inviting us to decipher meanings through association, playfully undermining the systems of explanation we think we know so well . Egger’s linguistic cosmos draws on the multilingualism and landscapes of his South Tyrolean heritage. Guided by sensory perception and traversing the literary fields of the German language in all their varieties, Oswald Egger carries on a great tradition of articulating a physiognomy of natural forms through writing, from stones to clouds. The world contained in his work eludes the direct grasp of the reader, just as his textual landscapes reference the ungraspable in art.«
Since 1951, the Georg Büchner Prize has been awarded to outstanding writers who, in the words of the statutes of the German Academy for Language and Literature, »write in German, whose oeuvre stands out strongly among their peers, and who have made a significant contribution to shaping contemporary German cultural life«. The Büchner Prize is the most important literary award in Germany, and previous winners include Max Frisch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainald Goetz, Friederike Mayröcker, Clemens J. Setz, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and, most recently, Lutz Seiler.
The prize is endowed with €50,000 and will be awarded on 2 November 2024 in Darmstadt. The award is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Art and Culture, and the City of Darmstadt.
For more information on any of Oswald Egger’s works, please contact the foreign rights manager for your region.
In a public statement, the jury remarked that in awarding the prize to Egger, the »German Academy for Language and Literature is honouring a writer who has been transcending and expanding the boundaries of literary production ever since his first publication in 1993. He has created a continuum of works that figures language as movement, as sound, as texture, as image, and as performance, and actively responds to the way that language is constantly shifting through writing and everyday use. His prose poems and loosely woven texts defy any desire for quick and superficial reading, inviting us to decipher meanings through association, playfully undermining the systems of explanation we think we know so well . Egger’s linguistic cosmos draws on the multilingualism and landscapes of his South Tyrolean heritage. Guided by sensory perception and traversing the literary fields of the German language in all their varieties, Oswald Egger carries on a great tradition of articulating a physiognomy of natural forms through writing, from stones to clouds. The world contained in his work eludes the direct grasp of the reader, just as his textual landscapes reference the ungraspable in art.«
Since 1951, the Georg Büchner Prize has been awarded to outstanding writers who, in the words of the statutes of the German Academy for Language and Literature, »write in German, whose oeuvre stands out strongly among their peers, and who have made a significant contribution to shaping contemporary German cultural life«. The Büchner Prize is the most important literary award in Germany, and previous winners include Max Frisch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainald Goetz, Friederike Mayröcker, Clemens J. Setz, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and, most recently, Lutz Seiler.
The prize is endowed with €50,000 and will be awarded on 2 November 2024 in Darmstadt. The award is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Art and Culture, and the City of Darmstadt.
For more information on any of Oswald Egger’s works, please contact the foreign rights manager for your region.
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