Alcohol, depression, suicide: In “On felling a family tree,” writer Martin Piekar deals with his own childhood and life with his mentally ill mother. For this, he has now received the Robert Gernhardt Prize.
Martin Piekar’s lyrics are not for the faint-hearted. When he tells the story of a boy growing up who lives with his depressed and alcoholic mother in a small apartment and has to witness a suicide attempt, it sounds like this:
“The blood was floating on the carpet, as if he didn’t want it. She woke up briefly, looked at me. She looked at me – and recognized me.” The excerpt comes from “On the felling of a family tree”, a chapter from the debut novel by the 34-year-old from Bad Soden (Main-Taunus).
It is a mammoth project: he has been working on it for six years and the book is due to be finished next year. The text has already convinced the jury of the Robert Gernhardt Prize. They chose the 34-year-old author as one of this year’s prizewinners.
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Since 2009, the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art has been awarding the Robert Gernhardt Prize to authors each year who are involved in the realization of major literary projects that have a connection to Hesse. It is named after the author, illustrator and painter Robert Gernhardt, who died in Frankfurt in 2006. The prize money totaling 24,000 euros is donated by the State of Hesse and the Hessen Economic and Infrastructure Bank (WIBank).
Novel with autobiographical elements
Piekar’s first novel has a lot to do with his real life story. Piekar was born to Polish parents in 1990 in Bad Soden. His father returned to Poland, while his mother and son stayed behind and struggled through life. His mother worked in elderly care and suffered from depression and alcohol addiction, and later became dependent on care.
“I was pushed into the role of parent very early on, as a child, as a teenager,” says Piekar. He had a “very charged, complicated relationship” with his mother, which brought him “to the edge as a human being.”
Family stories create connections
Despite the difficult relationship, the two remained in close contact – partly through the stories his mother told him about her Polish family. These will now be included in Piekar’s book.
The fact that he has been working on it for six years now is also due to the high literary demands that Piekar sets for himself: he keeps revising his text. On the one hand, because it helps him to process the traumatic experiences. On the other hand, he is always looking for even better, more accurate formulations.
As a teenager he writes poems
Piekar says he has always enjoyed using words creatively. He wrote his first poems when he was 14. Not exactly the most popular hobby among his peers, but it was a cheap one. “I grew up poor,” says Piekar. To write poems, he only needed a pen and a sheet of paper.
While studying to become a teacher at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Piekar published his first volumes of poetry. His literary art has received numerous awards, including the hr2 Literature Prize in 2015 and 2016. Last year he received two awards at the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Literature Prize, including the Audience Prize in the reading competition.
Piekar relies on colloquial language
Whether he is writing poems or a novel, it is important to Piekar that his texts can be understood by as many people as possible. That is why they contain a lot of colloquial language.
“Literature as an art form should not be separated from ordinary language,” says the 34-year-old. His book also contains a lot of direct speech. “Because I am also interested in human storytelling,” he explains. “How one voice communicates something to another is important.”
Conveying joy in texts
This is also why the author travels a lot to schools, opening up new ways of accessing texts for children and young people – with the help of social media, among other things. A current Tiktok trend, for example, works well in the classroom: “Tell me lemon without saying lemon.”
The children should find descriptions, think about language – and develop a creative approach to using words and texts. According to the approach: Anyone who notices how much fun playing with language brings, may also start writing texts themselves. Just like Martin Piekar did as a teenager.
Jury awards prizes to two literary projects
In addition to Martin Piekar, the art professor and educational scientist Christina Griebel was awarded the Robert Gernhardt Prize. Her submitted narrative project “He never flew” is about a family from the Rhine-Hesse region. The focus is on the father of the first-person narrator, who never leaves the house without his binoculars and his bird identification book. The jury praised Griebel’s poetic and descriptive language.
