The writer, actress and theater director Emine Sevgi Özdamar will receive the Georg Büchner Prize 2022. The German Academy for Language and Poetry announced on Tuesday in Darmstadt, Hesse, that she would honor an “outstanding author”. The jury emphasized Özdamar’s importance for German language and literature. Both owe the 75-year-old “new horizons, themes and a highly poetic sound”.
The Turkish-born writer has been enriching the German literary scene with her works for around 30 years. Her multi-perspective texts are characterized by unusual literary stylistic devices. Özdamar’s work opens up a “both intellectual and poetic dialogue between different languages, cultures and worldviews”.
Özdamar has already been awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, among others. The Georg Büchner Prize, worth 50,000 euros, is to be awarded on November 5th. Since 1951, the Academy has awarded the prize to writers who write in German. According to the statutes, the prizewinners must “stand out in a special way through their works and creations” and “have made a significant contribution to the shaping of current German cultural life”. The prize is financed by the federal government, the state of Hesse and the city of Darmstadt.
The winners include Max Frisch (1958), Günter Grass (1965) and Heinrich Böll (1967) and most recently Rainald Goetz, Marcel Beyer, Jan Wagner, Terézia Mora, Lukas Bärfuss, Elke Erb and Clemens J. Setz. It is named after the dramatist and revolutionary Georg Büchner (“Woyzeck”). He was born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1813 and died in Zurich in 1837.
