Marcel Beyer wins Peter-Huchel-Preis 2021
We are pleased to announce that Marcel Beyer has won the Peter-Huchel-Preis for his poetry collection Daemonenraeumdienst (Demon Removal Service), published last year by Suhrkamp.
The prize is endowed with € 10.000 and has been awarded in the past to Durs Grünbein, Friederike Mayröcker, Michael Krüger, Marion Poschmann and Wolfgang Hilbig among others.
From the jury’s statement:
»Marcel Beyer’s poems are adventurous expeditions into familiar territory that suddenly seems strange and eerie. The parental home and Elvis, childhood impressions, magical encounters and phenomena of pop culture and the heroes of the gossip columns – all of this is captured in Beyer’s strictly composed poems, put into extraordinary contexts, alienated and arranged anew through the means of quotes, collages, humour and ironic twists. The title Demon Removal Service is indeed meant to be taken literally. The ghosts of the most recent German past are invoked only to be whirled around and subjected to a poetic choreography: a clean-up operation in the mind’s eye of an inventive author.«
