Büchner Prize for author Egger – “News as a feeling of happiness”
Published: Friday, Jul 19th 2024, 12:40
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For Oswald Egger, poetry and literature are a constant pursuit. This year, the 61-year-old writer has been awarded the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize. "With Oswald Egger, the German Academy for Language and Poetry is honoring a writer who has transcended and expanded the boundaries of literary production since his first publication in 1993," said the Academy in Darmstadt, explaining the jury's decision.
The prize, endowed with 50,000 euros, is to be awarded on November 2 at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. It is one of the most important literary awards in the German-speaking world.
Surprised by the award
"My ideas come from my head, which I wear 24 hours a day, I think," Egger told the German Press Agency after the award winner was announced. "And then there is also something on the outside, when something stirs in my consciousness." This is how he understands, recognizes and explains the world. The award of the Georg Büchner Prize came as a surprise to the married father of two. He had not expected it. He was told a few days ago. "The initial force with which the news hit me as an immediate feeling of happiness is no longer completely acute."
The jury's reasons
"He works on a continuum of works that understands language as movement, as sound, as texture, as image, as performance and develops in the updating and changing use of language," the jury said in its statement. His prose poems and text fabrics defy quick reading, "invite us to decipher meanings by association and playfully undermine the systems of explanation that we think we know." Egger's cosmos of words is based on multilingualism "and the landscapes of his South Tyrolean origins." The award-winning writer was born in Merano, studied literature and philosophy in Vienna and currently lives at the Hombroich rocket station near Neuss, a museum site.
Numerous publications
"I would say there was already this strong affinity from the teenage years onwards," said Egger about his intention to write. "There are mountains and valleys to overcome." There was a longer break during his studies. He only published his first book relatively late after that. His first work, "Die Erde der Rede" (The Earth of Speech), appeared in 1993. "In 2010, he published "Die ganze Zeit" (All of Time), a book of almost 800 pages with prose texts, quatrains and drawings about the phenomenon of time, which was praised by critics as a complete work of art," the academy announced. Most recently, the volume "Farbkompartimente" was published last year.
Egger in a line of great poets
"In the series of Georg Büchner Prize winners, the German Academy for Language and Poetry is once again honoring an author whose core activity is poetry, the poem that has been pushed to the margins," announced Hauke Hückstädt, Director of the Literaturhaus Frankfurt. If one looks at the prizewinners of the past ten years alone, this honor puts him in a line with the great poets Jürgen Becker, Marcel Beyer, Jan Wagner, Elke Erb and Lutz Seiler.
The history of the award
The Academy has been awarding the prize to writers who write in German since 1951. According to the statutes, the prizewinners must "stand out in particular through their work" and "make a significant contribution to shaping contemporary German cultural life". The prize is funded by the federal government, the state of Hesse and the city of Darmstadt.
Resounding names among the award winners
Previous winners include Max Frisch (1958), Günter Grass (1965) and Heinrich Böll (1967), and most recently Terézia Mora, Lukas Bärfuss, Elke Erb and Clemens J. Setz. The award is named after the playwright and revolutionary Georg Büchner ("Woyzeck"). He was born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1813 and died in Zurich in 1837.
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