Hamburg / Berlin (dpa) – The independent Hamburg publisher CulturBooks has been awarded the Hotlist 2021 award. The publisher received the prize, endowed with 5000 euros, for the novel “New York Ghost” by Ling Ma, as the Hotlist association announced on Friday in Berlin. The jury declared that the novel by the American-Chinese debutante Ling Ma was “rousingly translated” by Zoë Beck for the publisher CulturBooks.
The book is also “a terrifyingly contemporary end-time narrative, which is just as convincing as a fast-paced pop-literary pandemic novel as it is as a clever, humorous satire on the state of mind of young city dwellers who feel trapped in the capitalist system and at the same time alienated from it”. The second prize, endowed with 1500 euros for typesetting costs, goes to Limmat-Verlag for the volume of stories “Fern von hier” by Adelheid Duvanel.
The hotlist jury includes literary journalists, critics and booksellers. The hotlist presents the books of the year from independent publishers in German-speaking countries. According to the information, the list is created through a combination of internet voting and jury decision. This year, 179 publishers took part in the competition, ten books made it onto the 2021 hotlist as “Books of the Year”.
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