Literature: Austrian Natascha Gangl wins Bachmann Prize 2025

Natascha Gangl has won the renowned Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt, Austria. The jury announced on Sunday. The Austrian author prevailed against 13 competitors at the literary competition.

The 39-year-old language artist won the award for her poetic text “Da Sta” (“The Stone”), in which she was looking for the hidden traces of a Nazi crowd that was committed to the end of the Second World War near the Slovenian border at the end of the Second World War. Juror Brigitte Schwens-Harrant spoke in her eulogy of an “incredibly precise text”.

What is known about the author?

Around a privately built memorial stone for shot Jews, Gangl asks questions about remembering and forgetting. The text is designed like a poem over long distances. The jury was not only impressed by the artistic language technology, but also from the dense atmosphere that gangl created with dialect passages and exact nature observations.

After several years of stay in Mexico and Spain, the author lives in Vienna today and in her original home in Styria. Gangl writes prose, essays and speech texts. Together with the band RDECA RAKTA, she has developed a new form of the hearing piece, which she calls “Klangcomic”.

The Berlin writer Boris Schumatsky won the Berlin writer, which was endowed with 12,500 euros, with a text about the impossibility of returning to his hometown of Moscow.

The main prize at the annual days of German -language literature is donated by the city of Klagenfurt. He commemorates the Austrian literary Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973). Last year he won the author Tijan Sila, born in Sarajevo and lived in Heidelberg, for his text “The day when my mother went crazy”.

Bachmann Prize appointment 2025