Büchner Prize winner Elke Erb is dead. The German poet died last night in Berlin at the age of 85, as a spokeswoman for Suhrkamp Verlag said today, citing Erb's environment.
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The writer (“Kastanienallee”) was born in Scherbach in the Eifel in 1938. More recently she lived in Berlin. In 2018, “Die Zeit” once described her as the “queen of poetic stubbornness”. In 2020, Erb was honored with the Georg Büchner Prize, considered Germany's most important literary award.
“Fearless Illuminator”
“For the fearless Enlightenment, poetry is a political and extremely lively form of knowledge,” the German Academy of Language and Poetry said of Erb at the time. Like no other, she can “perceive the freedom and agility of thoughts in language, challenging them, relaxing them, making them more precise and even correcting them”.
She studied German, Slavic studies and pedagogy and worked as an editor at Mitteldeutscher Verlag in the 1960s.
His work includes poetry, short prose and translations. His first books were “Expert Reports, Poetry and Prose” (1975) and “The Thread of Patience” (1978), and selected texts have also appeared in the West. “I react like a wind harp and record its sounds faithfully, like a research report,” Erb once described her work.