The shortlist for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize: Time of the Transformed

When on April 27th, a good month later than usual, after a three-year break due to the pandemic, the Leipzig Book Fair prize is awarded again in the glass hall of the Leipzig exhibition center, it may well be that an old acquaintance will receive one of the three prizes: Clemens J. Set. In 2011, Setz won once with his novel “The Love of the Mahlstadt Child”.

Now he has been nominated again for his biographical novel about the Worms writer, founder of a religion and apologist for the hollow world Peter Bender. In terms of celebrity, Setz’s biggest competitor in the fiction category is Berlin writer Ulrike Draesner, who was chosen for her novel Die Verwandten. This tells numerous German-Polish stories about the Second World War, flight and expulsion. Like Setz, who received the Georg Büchner Prize last year, Draesner is an award-winning author, including the Nicolas Born Prize in 2016 and the Bavarian Book Prize in 2020.

Will an outsider win?

In contrast, the other nominees are less well known: Angela Steidele is there with her historical-feminist novel “Enlightenment” about the Gottscheds and Bach’s daughter, Joshua Groß with his generational dystopia “Prana Extrem” and Dincer Gücyeter with her polyphonic guest worker and family novel ” Our German fairy tale”. Just as outsider novels by Iris Hanika and Tomer Gardi have won the race in recent years, it could well be that Steidele, Groß or Gücyeter will win this year.

Even if this prize in Leipzig does not have the appeal of its counterpart in Frankfurt, the German Book Prize, it distinguishes itself by not only awarding prizes to novels, but also to non-fiction books and translations. Although they are always somewhat overshadowed by fiction when it comes to reporting, they are often the more interesting, better books, which is often not surprising when it comes to translations, because they are sometimes world literature.

This time it’s more about discoveries, like Nicole Nau’s translation from Latvian of Zigmund Skujin’s The Bed with the Golden Leg. Legend of a family.” Or Brigitte Oleschinski and Osman Yousufi’s translation from Arabic of Lina Atfah’s “Shroud of Butterflies”.

There is also the Potsdam writer Antje Rávik Strubel, who translated Monika Fagerholm’s “Who Killed Bambi” from Swedish, Johanna Schwering, who translated Aurora Venturini’s novel “The Cousins” from Argentine Spanish, and Katharina Triebner-Cabald, who translated Max Lobes “Confidentialities” as a French translator was responsible. Translations, this is how it works in this year’s selection, seem to be primarily a matter for women.

A comic for the first time

The non-fiction books are missing. Here, perhaps, Oliver Nachtwey’s and Carolin Amlinger’s much-discussed study of libertarian authoritarianism (“Gekränkte Freiheit”) and Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s portrait of Christoph Martin Wieland (see page 27) stand out.

There is also a comic for the first time, namely the life story of the black German professor Priscilla Layne, which Birgit Weyhe tells, Regina Scheer’s portrait of Hertha Gordon-Walcher (“Bittere Pillen”) and Simone Schlindwein’s book “The Green War. How nature is protected in Africa at the expense of the people – and what the West has to do with it.” It’s easy to say about this entire shortlist: there hasn’t been so much refinement for a long time. Which in turn makes Setz and Reemtsma absolute outsiders.

To home page