German-Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar will receive the 2022 Georg Büchner Prize. This was announced by the German Academy of Language and Poetry in Darmstadt on Tuesday. The prize, worth 50,000 euros, is the most important literary prize in the German-speaking world and has been awarded since 1951. The prize will be presented to the 75-year-old author on 5 November in Darmstadt.
The German language owes Özdamar “new horizons, themes and a highly poetic sound”. The writer, actress and theater director, born August 10, 1946 in Malatya (Turkey), who visited still-divided Berlin for the first time in 1965, “enriched the German-language literary scene with her novels, short stories and plays for more decades, most recently with the magnum opus ‘A space surrounded by shadows'”, the jury’s statement reads: “Unusual literary stylistic devices and Turkish-inspired ways of speaking characterize his multi-perspective texts, which, in addition to intimate personal experiences, unfold a broad panorama of German-Turkish history – from the First World War to the spirit of optimism from the 60s and 70s to the present day.”
Özdamar’s work opens “a dialogue that is both intellectual and poetic between different languages, cultures and worldviews, in which we can participate in reading”. (apa)