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Georg Büchner Prize goes to poet Elke Erb

The award is probably the most important literary award for German-speaking authors. The poet Erb got him at the age of 82.

The German poet Elke Erb receives the Georg Büchner Prize 2020. With the award to the 82-year-old an “unmistakable and independent literary life work” is honored, announced the German Academy for Language and Poetry on Tuesday in Darmstadt. The prize, endowed with 50,000 euros, is considered the most important literary award in German-speaking countries and is to be awarded on October 31.

Erb’s “poetic expertise” can be seen in her translation work and has influenced several generations of poets in East and West, the reasons given. The jury praised the “processual and investigative spelling” of her poems, in which language is both the subject and the means of the investigation. Erb succeeds like no other in “realizing the freedom and agility of thoughts in language by challenging them, loosening them up”.

Moved to the GDR as a child

Elke Erb, one of the three daughters of the literary scholar Ewald Erb, was born on February 18, 1938 in Scherbach in the Eifel. As a child, in 1949, she moved with her family to the GDR in Halle an der Saale. There she attended high school, for a year she was a farm worker. Erb studied German, Slavic, History and Pedagogy. Later she worked as an editor at the Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle. She has been a freelance writer and translator in Berlin since 1966. She mainly translated works from Russian. Her own work includes poetry, short prose, procedural texts, translations, reprints and editions.

Elke Erb 2010.(c) WHAT / Gerald Zoerner (Gerald Zoerner)

Erb’s debut “Gutachten, Poesie und Prosa” (1975) followed “Der Faden der Geduld” (1978). Her work on an anthology of “unofficial literature” and her protest against the expatriation of civil rights activist Roland Jahn led to surveillance by the State Security Service. In 1987 she published the volume “Kastanienallee. Texts and Comments”, which critics described as epochal. Erb was honored with numerous awards, including the Ernst Jandl Prize 2013 and the German Federal Cross of Merit 2019.

>>> Read or listen to poetry by Elke Erb here

The award winners must “stand out to a special degree through their work and works” and “have a significant part in shaping the current German cultural life”. The award winners include Max Frisch (1958), Günter Grass (1965) and Heinrich Böll (1967) and most recently since 2015 Rainald Goetz, Marcel Beyer, Jan Wagner, Terézia Mora and Lukas Bärfuss. The Austrian Walter Kappacher was awarded the prize in 2009, the year before he went to Josef Winkler.

(red./APA)

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