German Book Prize 2021 goes to Antje Rávik Strubel
Antje Rávik Strubel has been awarded the German Book Prize 2021 for her novel Blaue Frau (Blue Woman, S. Fischer Verlag)!
From the jury's statement:
With existential force and poetic precision, Antje Rávik Strubel describes a young woman’s escape from her memories of being raped. Layer by layer, this unsettling novel exposes what happened. The story of female self-empowerment expands into a reflection on competing cultures of memory in Eastern and Western Europe and the power imbalance between the sexes. In a tentative narrative movement, Antje Rávik Strubel succeeds in giving voice to what is actually unspeakable about a traumatic experience. In her dialogue with the mythical figure of the Blue Woman, the narrator sums up her interventional poetics: literature as a fragile counterforce against injustice and violence in the face of despair.
The press is celebrating this "brilliant decision", pointing out how the novel "spans across the whole continent and goes beyond the barriers of our certainties" (FAZ) and is "a little work of wonder in contemporary literature" (Die Welt).
Italian rights are still available and an English sample can be found here.
