Literature. The Austrian author receives 20,000 euros. He has had a lot of bad luck in awarding prizes.
If there is currently a German-speaking writer whose meaning is not reflected in literary awards, it is the Graz native Clemens Setz. It was nine years ago that he received the fiction prize of the Leipzig Book Fair for his narrative volume “The love for the time of the Mahlstadt child”. Eight years that his novel “Indigo” was on the shortlist of the German Book Prize (and did not win it). Only in 2015 was his long-praised novel “The Hour Between Woman and Guitar” on the longlist. Most recently, Setz narrowly missed the Austrian Book Prize in 2019 with his latest volume of stories, “The Consolation of Round Things”, which went to Norbert Gstrein. He was supposed to meet the first-person narrator of one of his stories in Canada, but the plane does not fly, the narrator returns home, which is filled with enigmatic strangers. In Setz’s stories it doesn’t always come what you would expect, that it soon frees you from almost all expectations – apart from the great literature, coherent language for the never coherent.
In 2018, the award went to Ransmayr
In this way, it somehow fits in with his literature that this author rarely goes smoothly when it comes to prices. But this time it is different: Clemens Setz, who once wrote Ernst Jandl because of his enthusiasm for poetry, received one of the most important German-language literary prizes with the Kleist Prize two years after the Austrian Christoph Ransmayr. The jury explained her decision: “A literary extremist in the best sense, a storyteller and playwright who always amazes his readers with anarchic imagination and malevolent cheerfulness”. His curious look at the world is shifting the standards of normality. The award is endowed with 20,000 euros, the award could take place despite Corona: It is planned for November 22 in Berlin.
Unlike the summer Bachmann betting in Klagenfurt, which, as the ORF announced, will be canceled this year due to Corona. In 2019, Setz delivered one of the best opening speeches in a long time: he drew parallels between wrestling, the pros of which, outside of sports, must never fall outside of their roles, politics and literature. He opposed the closed systems to the freedom from fictions, “which, even if one takes them mercilessly seriously, leave creatures to be mature, even if they insist so much and so persistently to the contrary.”
(“Die Presse”, print edition, March 31, 2020)
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