Austrian Natascha Gangl wins the Bachmann Prize

Klagenfurt. Austrian author Natascha Gangl has been awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her literary masterpiece about remembering and forgetting. Her challenging text "DA STA" ("The Stone") impressed not only the jury but also the audience in Klagenfurt, Austria.

Therefore, 39-year-old Gangl received not only the main prize of €25,000 donated by the City of Klagenfurt, but also the Audience Award. "Es ziacht mia die Schlapf' aus," said the visibly moved author in dialect, which means "It takes my shoes off." The main prize commemorates the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973).

In her competition entry, Gangl searches for the hidden traces of a Nazi crime that was committed in her homeland near the Slovenian border towards the end of the Second World War.

The jury was impressed not only by the artistic and lyrical language technique, but also by the dense atmosphere Gangl created with dialect passages and precise observations of nature. In her laudatory speech, juror Brigitte Schwens-Harrant called it an "incredibly precisely crafted text."

The award winners (from left): Boris Schumatsky, Tara Meister, Natascha Gangl, Almut Tina Schmidt and Nora Osagiobare.

Source: Wolfgang Jannach/APA/dpa

For example, in a passage in which the author is looking for a privately erected memorial stone for Jews shot in a forest, the ground with its hidden traces of crime is described as follows: “An open organ that chews, digests, ferments, gives.”

Gangl writes prose, essays, and spoken texts. Together with the band Rdeca Raketa, she has developed a new form of audio piece, which she calls "sound comics." After several years in Mexico and Spain, the author now lives in Vienna and in her original homeland of Styria.

She said she was now taking the Bachmann Prize to a place where many people long for "an open, inclusive, multilingual Styria." Gangl was referring not only to the Slovene minority in her state, but also to the state government led by the right-wing FPÖ.

In the three days leading up to the awards ceremony, 14 authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland read their texts as part of the 49th Days of German Literature. The competition is organized by the Austrian broadcaster ORF. In the jury's public discussions, a group of favorites soon emerged, almost all of whom were rewarded with further prizes.

Berlin writer Boris Schumatsky won the Deutschlandfunk Prize, endowed with €12,500, for a text about the impossibility of returning to his hometown of Moscow. Swiss author Nora Osagiobare received the €10,000 KELAG Prize for her fast-paced narrative about a cocaine binge and a crazy reality TV show in which fathers receive millions of dollars if they cut off contact with their daughters.

Almut Tina Schmidt, originally from Göttingen, proved that texts with a calm narrative style and seemingly banal settings can also be compelling. For her story about a house with many apartments in which women struggle with unhappy relationships, violence, or illness, the Vienna-based author won the 3sat Prize worth €7,500. Tara Meister from Austria received a writing scholarship.

One of the favorites went home empty-handed: The physicist and author Thomas Bissinger, who lives in Konstanz, presented an excerpt from his historical novel project about the family of the physicist Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1933) and received great praise from the jury for his artistic language, into which he also wove Dutch elements.

However, some of the jury members questioned whether the text did justice to the subject of Nazi persecution, which the excerpt addresses. Bissinger gratefully accepted the criticism. "I also think there's still some way to go," he said of his novel, which is scheduled to be published next year.

RND/dpa