Grand Prix Literature 2024 goes to the Aargau author Klaus Merz
Published: Thursday, Feb 15th 2024, 11:10
Updated At: Thursday, Feb 15th 2024, 11:10
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The Swiss Grand Prix Literature 2024 goes to Klaus Merz from Aargau. Dorothea Trottenberg can look forward to the Special Prize for Translation. This was announced by the Federal Office of Culture (BAK) on Thursday.
"With the Aargau author, a rather quiet, but all the more insistent and weighty voice is being honored, which finds an echo chamber far beyond Switzerland's borders," said the BAK in justifying the award for Klaus Merz. His "multifaceted oeuvre" covers a wide range, from poetry and prose to children's books. The Swiss Grand Prix for Literature is endowed with 40,000 Swiss francs and honors the complete works of the recipient.
"Klaus Merz takes his time so that what he has experienced can sink in until it slowly transforms into literature," writes the BAK. It describes Merz's 1997 novel "Jakob schläft" as a "masterpiece" that helped him achieve his international breakthrough. Literary scholar Peter von Matt said that the story is "a poem" despite its prose form. The novel tells a family story about the void left by a brother who died at birth. Klaus Merz only needs a few words to complete a poem.
Sad and cheerful
For him, writing is about "Memory. Love. Insight," Merz told the Keystone-SDA news agency in 2020. And anger. His first volume of poetry, "Mit gesammelter Blindheit", was published in 1967. He published his most recent work, "Noch Licht im Haus", in 2023. In between, there are around thirty books in which he repeatedly deals with illness and death, but there is also room for "light-filled cheerfulness", according to the BAK.
The 78-year-old's work has earned him numerous prizes, including the Swiss Schiller Foundation Prize three times for "Jakob schläft" (1997) and "Los" (2005), the Gottfried Keller Prize for his complete works (2004), the Solothurn Literature Prize (1996) and, most recently, the Christine Lavant Prize (2018). And now comes the Grand Prix Literatur 2024, one of Switzerland's most prestigious awards.
The BAK is awarding the Special Prize for Translation 2024 to the Swiss-German Dorothea Trottenberg, "one of the most productive freelance translators in German-speaking Switzerland", according to the press release. This award is also endowed with 40,000 francs. It is awarded every two years, alternating with the special prize for mediation.
Translator and lecturer
Trottenberg translates Russian literature into German, from classics to contemporary works. For example, she has translated "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy and authors such as Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev. Among the contemporary authors she has translated are Elena Chizhova and Maria Rybakova. Trottenberg has been translating the complete works of Ivan Bunin since 2005; ten volumes have already been published.
Born in Germany, she works at the Basel University Library as a subject librarian for Slavic and Eastern European Studies alongside her translations. She originally trained as a librarian before studying Slavic studies in Cologne and St. Petersburg. In 2012, the German Literature Fund awarded her the Paul Celan Prize, one of the most important awards for literary translations into German.
Swiss Literary Awards 2024
This year's Swiss Literature Prizes are awarded by the BAK to Bessora for "Vous, les ancêtres", Jérémie Gindre for "Tombola", Judith Keller for "Wilde Manöver", Dominic Oppliger for "giftland", Claudia Quadri for "Infanzia e bestiario", Ed Wige for "Milch Lait Latte Mleko" and Ivna Žic for "Wahrscheinliche Herkünfte". These prizes, each worth CHF 25,000, honor Swiss authors for their books published between September 2022 and October 2023.
The BAK has been awarding these prizes for Swiss literature since 2012, taking into account all language regions of Switzerland and the various literary genres. The awards will be presented on May 10 as part of the Solothurn Literary Festival.
©Keystone/SDA
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