German Book Prize in Frankfurt goes to Strubel – FFH.de
Antje Rávik Strubel receives the German Book Prize 2021. This was announced by the German Book Trade Association in Frankfurt.
Your book “Blaue Frau” was named the best German-language novel of the year. The prize is endowed with 25,000 euros. The novel, published by S. Fischer, describes the escape of a young woman from her memories of a rape.
Power imbalance between the sexes
The jury judged the author to treat the subject “with existential force and poetic precision”. “The story of female self-empowerment expands into a reflection on rival cultures of remembrance in Eastern and Western Europe and power gaps between the sexes.”
Bringing up the unspeakable
The “stirring novel” convinced the jury: “In a tentative narrative movement, Antje Rávik Strubel succeeds in bringing up what is actually inexpressible in a traumatic experience. In a dialogue with the mythical figure of the Blue Woman, the narrator condenses her poetic poetics: literature as fragile Countervailing power that opposes injustice and violence in spite of all despair. “
Strubel was born in Potsdam in 1974. She first trained as a bookseller and then studied psychology and literature in Potsdam and New York. She later lived in Sweden, among other places, before returning to Potsdam.
Three men and three women had made it to the final
The five other authors on the shortlist will each receive 2500 euros. Three men and three women had made it to the final: Besides Strubel there were Norbert Gstrein (“The Second Jacob”), Christian Kracht (“Eurotrash”), Thomas Kunst (“Zandschower Klinken”), Mithu Sanyal (“Identitti”) and Monika Helfer (“Daddy”) on the shortlist for the book award.