Lutz Seiler receives Georg Büchner Prize 2023
© Andreas Reeg/Deutsche Akademie
From Suhrkamp's announcement:
The German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the Georg Büchner Prize 2023 to Lutz Seiler.
The jury states:
With Lutz Seiler, the German Academy for Language and Literature honours an author who began his career with melodious volumes of poetry and then found his way to storytelling, but he always remained a lyricist as clear as he is enigmatic, darkly luminous, most recently publishing the volume schrift für blinde riesen. His essays and lectures on poetry, on the other hand, bear witness to his argumentative precision. Lutz Seiler spent his years of ›apprenticeship‹ in Thuringia, and this background has a profound influence on his narrative work in particular. Edgar Bendler in the run-down pub on Hiddensee, the main character in the novel Kruso, has long since left his country behind, without ever leaving the GDR. Thus Kruso and the subsequent novel Stern 111 form the great epic of a declining country. As a novelist and as a poet, Lutz Seiler has found his own distinctive voice, melancholic, urgent, sincere, full of the wonderful echoes of a long literary tradition.
Since 1951, the German Academy for Language and Literature has been awarding the Georg Büchner Prize to German-language writers who »stand out eminently with their works and books and play a significant role in shaping contemporary cultural life in Germany«. The Büchner Prize is considered the most important literary award in Germany.
Past recipients include Max Frisch, Paul Celan, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Thomas Bernhard, Uwe Johnson, Elias Canetti, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Friederike Mayröcker and most recently Clemens J. Setz and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, making this the third consecutive year in which the prize is received by a Suhrkamp author.
