The German author Urusla Krechel receives the Georg Büchner Prize, the most important award for German-language literature. This was announced by the German Academy of Language and Poetry on Tuesday morning. In the reason of the jury it is said that an author is characterized by “in her poems, plays, plays, radio plays, novels and essays to the devastations of German history and hardening of the present”. It “dissects the mistakes and hopes of everyday life, the interior views of the class relationships”.
In her work, Ursula Krechel repeatedly devotes himself to the topics of displacement and persecution, violence and feminism. In her novel trilogy “Shanghai Far from Wo” (2008), “District Court” (2012) and “Ghostbahn” (2018), she deals with the persecution of Jews and Sinti, also describes the return from exile to a Germany in which they feel foreign and not belonging. This is also the case in her novel “Regional Court” (2012), which was awarded the German Book Prize in 2012, which tells of a Jewish judge who came back from exile in Cuba to Germany in 1947 and breaks this new life.
The topics of female self -assertion, rediscovery and further development of female authors are also central points in Krechels. Her work lively “readers, to find the traces of the past in the everyday life of the present and not to accept this here and now to the German society as it is,” says the jury foundation.
:To women and feelings
In Ursula Krechel’s novel “Dear Minister”, the blood flows freely, and sons are hate on the first woman in her life. It could be exactly the book that we need in the patriarchal backlash of our day.
Ursula Krechel was born in Trier in 1947, she studied German studies, theater studies and art history in Cologne, where she also received his doctorate. For some time she worked as a dramaturge on the city stages Dortmund, so her literary debut was also a play: “Erika”, 1974, about a young woman who wants to break out of the petty bourgeoisie. After a first volume of poems “to Mainz!” Finally followed her first first novel “second nature” in 1981.
To this day it changes between poetry, epic and essayistics
This year the novel “Dear Minister” appeared – at the center of which four women stand in antiquity and present whose life is shaped by violence. Her last publications include “by no means and matters. Poems” (2021) and the essay band “Go, dream, see. Under trees” (2022). She also works as a director of a number of her own radio plays, to this day she changes poetry, epic and essayistics between the literary genres.
Krechel teaches as a visiting professor at the German Literature Institute Leipzig, at the University of the Arts in Berlin, is a member of the Berlin Academy, the German Academy of Language and Poetry and the Academy of Sciences and the Literature Mainz, whose vice president was from 2015 to 2021.
The German Academy of Language and Poetry awarded the prize annually, last year Oswald Egger, the author Lutz Seiler in 2023. The price is endowed with 50,000 euros and will be presented in Darmstadt on November 1, 2025.