June 21, 2022
Jury President Insa Wilke © APA/PETER LINDNER
Tomorrow, Wednesday, the German Language Literature Days celebrates his return to Klagenfurt. After two years of total or partial outsourcing to the internet related to corona, everyone can be live again in the 46th edition of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize reading contest: authors, jury and audience. Spatially, however, they are somewhat separate: for the first time, a reading stage will be set up in the garden, while the jury will be seated in the ORF theater hall.
The traditional Klagenfurt speech on literature, which this year will be given by author Anna Baar, will begin on Wednesday night. The author, who was born in Zagreb and lives in Klagenfurt and Vienna, participated in the contest in 2015 with an excerpt from her novel “The color of the pomegranate”. More recently, his volume of short stories “Divân mit Schonvorsicht” was published. His speech is titled “Truth is an impertinence”, probably an allusion to Bachmann’s famous quote from his speech when he received the “Radio Play Award for the Blind War” in 1959: “Truth is reasonable to people”. the poet, who died in 1973 and the same name as the award, would have turned 96 on June 25th.
The opening night’s fixed point is the drawing of the reading order between the nine male and five female authors who will present their unpublished texts on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. From Austria, Barbara Zeman from Burgenland and Elias Hirschl from Vienna are at the start. Clemens Bruno Gatzmaga, who was born in Düsseldorf, and Leon Engler, who hails from Bavaria, are also Viennese by choice. Ana Marwan, who comes from Slovenia, lives in Lower Austria.
The field of participants is more diverse than ever: Usama Al Shahmani, born in Baghdad in 1971, had to flee to Switzerland in 2002 for a play. Behzad Karim-Khani also has a migratory background. He was born in Tehran in 1977 and his family moved to Germany in 1986. He studied media studies and now lives in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where he writes and runs the Lugosi Bar. Poet Alexandru Bulucz, born in Romania in 1987, emigrated to Germany with his family in 2000. The German-American, on the other hand, is 57-year-old Hannes Stein, who grew up in Salzburg and in 2013 in his debut novel “Der Komet” allowed heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand to escape the assassination attempt in Sarajevo. Eva Sichelschmidt lives partially in Rome, the author, born in 1970, started to study seamstress and runs a company called “Whiskey & Cigars”.
“It’s not the origin that decides the literary quality,” said the head of the jury, Wilke, of the dpa. “Like society as a whole, the literary world must also reflect on its mechanisms of exclusion and strive to open it up.” Previously excluded perspectives may “lead to other stories as well as new literary media”. Klaus Kastberger, Brigitte Schwens-Harrant, Philipp Tingler and Michael Wiederstein, the rest of the jury hasn’t changed either. On the other hand, the evaluation method is completely new: at the end of all the readings and discussions – moderated by Cécile Schortmann and Christian Ankowitsch – the members of the jury assign their personal evaluation from one to nine points. The legal advisor adds up the results and creates the list of winners, which is kept secret until noon on Sunday. Only in the event of a tie in the prize, the jury will publicly vote as before.
The winners are the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize from the state capital of Klagenfurt, which is endowed with 25,000 euros, the Deutschlandfunk Prize (12,500 euros), the Kelag Prize (10,000 euros), the 3sat Prize (7,500 euros) and the BKS Bank Audience Prize (€7,000), which is also linked to the six-month allowance from the municipal secretary of the city of Klagenfurt in the amount of €6,000. The order in which they are announced is also new: to maintain suspense, start with the lowest prize. The main prize will be awarded last. Last year, Nava Ebrahimi, who was born in Tehran, grew up in Cologne and lives in Graz, won the Bachmann Prize.
The entire competition, as well as the award ceremonies, will be broadcast live on 3sat – a total of nearly 17 hours. Deutschlandradio will also broadcast the competition live. There are also extensive reports on the days of German-language literature on social media.
bachmannpreis.orf.at