Swiss Book Prize with literature that aims from the small to the large
Published: Sunday, Nov 17th 2024, 16:30
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Zora del Buono has been awarded the 2024 Swiss Book Prize for her research novel "Seinetwegen" (Because of Him). This is the first time a female author has been recognized for an autobiographical work. Last year, the award went to Christian Haller, an author who found a literary language for a scientific topic.
In "Because of Him", Zora del Buono explores the death of her father in August 1963. She herself was eight months old at the time, her father 33. He died in a car accident. Sixty years later, the author sets out in search of his "killer".
"Seinetwegen" is the record of a very personal research project. Little by little, del Buono weaves insights and associations into a multi-faceted, multi-layered collage in which central questions crystallize: What does it mean to grow up fatherless? What is it like to live with the guilt of having someone on your conscience?
Text that "affects everyone"
The Book Prize jury justified its decision in favor of "Seinetwegen" on Sunday by stating that del Buono had written a text "that concerns everyone, even though it is about the death of her father". She interweaves statistics, court documents and scenes from her life "with surprising ease". "In an independent language, del Buono deals with the question of guilt, loss and reconciliation", said the jury. "Seinetwegen" is a "quiet, unpretentious text full of existential impact".
After last year's award went to an author, Christian Haller, it was to be expected that this year it would be a female author. However, the shortlist itself is remarkable. In addition to del Buono, another family story was nominated for one of the most important literary prizes in Switzerland: "Tabak und Schokolade" by Martin R. Dean.
He also goes beyond his own biography in his novel. Dean places his own family history in a colonial historical context and spans an arc from the Caribbean to the Wynental in Aargau.
From the family history...
Michelle Steinbeck's "Favorita" also echoes her own family history. The first-person narrator grew up with her grandmother, who came to Switzerland from Italy. Steinbeck's grandmother was also Italian. In the novel "Favorita", Steinbeck uses the death of her narrator's mother as a starting point to denounce femicide today and in the 1940s.
This year, the Swiss Book Prize is therefore focusing on novels that take family histories as the starting point for their very own stories. del Buono's research is characterized by intimacy and a curiosity with which she places the personal story in a larger social context.
Dean and Steinbeck, on the other hand, represent a much more obvious political concern in their works. For Dean, the son of a Swiss woman and a father from Trinidad, his own family history stands for colonialism, for migration, for questions of belonging and home. Steinbeck, for her part, uses the fiction of her novel to put an end to a supposed "law of nature", according to which men kill women, in a grand finale.
The two other nominations also stand for a type of literature that aims from the small personal environment to the larger. Mariann Bühler's first novel "Verschiebung im Gestein" is based on three characters who all live or have lived in the same village at the foot of the mountains. Bühler finds her own approach to the genre of the Heimatroman by linking three different stories of liberation with geological processes.
Béla Rothenbühler also sets "Polifon Pervers" in a manageable community that he knows well as a theater man: a group of theater professionals in a fictitious small town. The author chooses the genre of the dialect novel to tell an ambiguous theatrical tale that takes satirical sideswipes at the cultural sector, cultural funding and, above all, the politics of the free market.
... on the major topics
This year's Swiss Book Prize highlights novels that take the personal as their starting point and then all focus on major themes. Not only does the book awarded the main prize concern everyone, as the jury said about "Seinetwegen", but this also applies to the five books on the shortlist as a whole.
The five-member jury had 84 books from 48 publishers to choose from. These works were published between October 2023 and September 2024. The main prize for Zora del Buono is endowed with 30,000 francs; the four other nominees each receive 3,000 francs. The prize is sponsored by the LiteraturBasel association and the Swiss Booksellers and Publishers Association (SBVV). The Swiss Book Prize has been in existence since 2008; it was awarded for the 17th time this year.
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