Sibylle Lewitscharoff receives the Georg Büchner Prize
Sibylle Lewitscharoff
© Imago / PPphotodesign"In her novels, Sibylle Lewitscharoff has re-explored and questioned the limits of what we consider to be our everyday reality with inexhaustible observation energy, narrative imagination and linguistic inventive power." Thus, the German Academy of Language and Poetry founds its decision to award the 2013 Georg Büchner Prize to Sibylle Lewitscharoff. The prize is considered the most important literary award in Germany and is endowed with 50,000 euros. Sibylle Lewitscharoff, who was born in Stuttgart in 1954, has already received many awards during her long career, including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (1998), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her novel Apostoloff (2009), the Berlin Literature Prize (2010), the Kleist Prize (2011), the Ricarda Huch Prize (2011) and the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize for the novel Blumenberg (2011). Currently, the writer is a scholarship holder of the Villa Massimo in Rome. In the summer semester 2013 she will take over the Brothers Grimm Professorship in Kassel.
You want to read something by Sibylle Lewitscharoff?
These are the three favorites of our literary expert Angela Wittmann:
"Apostoloff"
Two sisters tour Bulgaria. They are accompanied by a convoy of black limousines, with which the bodies of 19 exile Bulgarians from Stuttgart are transferred to the old homeland. Among them is the tyrannical father, who hanged himself and now appears unsolicited in the sisters' dreams. Sometimes he also sits in the car being chauffeured by chauffeur "Apostoloff". The hatred of the father becomes the hatred of the country: From the back seat, the first-person narrator leaves no good hair to the people, the language "with their labial blasts that do not want to ignite," the food, "that in bad oil drowned mud ". Sibylle Lewitscharoff's narrative reckoning with her father's homeland is politically incorrect, but is fun with her sonorous language.
247 pages, 19,80 Euro, hardcover, Suhrkamp, release date: 2009
"Montgomery"
"Montgomery", rich and spoiled by success, but very ill, threatens to slip away from life. For many years, the German film producer lives in Rome, where he manisch always pushes new projects - the best remedy against the always back-haunting melancholy. When he finally realizes his favorite film - a reworking of the "Jud Süß", the story of the Jewish banker Joseph Süß-Oppenheimer - suddenly the main actor disappeared. Meticulously combing the producer with his team, the Roman bar district, where he suspects the actor. Sibylle Lewitscharoff tells very original and captivating. Her novel is the subtle psychogram of a power-man who becomes driven.
346 pages, 9,99 Euro, Suhrkamp, release date: 2012
"Consummatus"
There are two found: the German teacher Ralph and the underground icon Joey, who has drifted around in their best times in Andy Warhol's Factory and later traveled with gloomy German songs full of nationalisms and Nibelungen through Europe. And the beloved Ralph had to drive the tour bus at night. From which she jumped out again and again, until she got under the wheels. But that was a long time ago. In Sibylle Lewitscharoff's novel "Consummatus" the memorable Ralph gets drunk in a Stuttgart cafe, surrounded by the dead of his life. Joey, his parents, but also Andy Warhol and Jim Morrison give their mustard. Ralph has also been in the hereafter, but he was brought back before he could take his Joey to Orpheus-Art. Sounds crazy? Playful is this book, idiosyncratic, wise, funny - and beautiful. Linguistically, in the stories and pictures, but also in his thoughts about death and the realm of the dead, the end and eternity.
240 pages, 8.95 euros, Suhrkamp, release date: 2010
