Ralf Rothmann awarded Thomas Mann-Preis 2023

The Thomas Mann-Preis 2023 has been awarded to author Ralf Rothmann by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Hanseatic City of Lübeck.

Since his debut novel Stier (1991), Ralf Rothmann, born in 1953, has made it possible to experience very different, chronically insecure life worlds in literary form in numerous novels and short stories: The mining milieu of the Ruhr region in the post-war period in the novels Milch und Kohle (2000) and Junges Licht (2004), Berlin around the turn of the millennium in Hitze (2003), and most recently World War II and post-war period, which shaped his own family history, in the trilogy of novels Im Frühling sterben (2015), Der Gott jenes Sommer (2018) and Die Nacht unterm Schnee (2022). His recent publications also include the collection of short stories Hotel der Schlaflosen (2020) and the forthcoming Theorie des Regens (April 2023), a collection of the author's notes over the course of a literary life. Like his poems, Rothmann’s novels and stories are characterised by their evocative images, the density of their milieu descriptions and an unpretentious language that aims for accuracy and follows the gravity of the author’s own experience.

Rothmann receives the Thomas-Mann-Preis 2023 for his narrative work, which uniquely delves into rough, gruelling working environments and at the same time depicts the crises and abysses of an artistic way of life.

The prize ceremony will be held on September 19, 2023, in Munich. The Thomas-Mann-Preis of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts has been awarded annually in alternation in Lübeck and Munich since 2010 and is endowed with 25,000 Euro. Previous winners of this prestigious prize include Nora Bossong, Jonathan Franzen, Mircea Cărtărescu, Jan Assmann, Christa Wolf, Daniel Kehlmann, Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Günter Grass and Uwe Johnson.

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