This was announced by the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt on Tuesday. The EUR 50,000 prize is the most important literary award in the German-speaking world and has been awarded since 1951. The award is to be presented to the 75-year-old author on November 5 in Darmstadt.
The German language owes Özdamar “new horizons, themes and a highly poetic sound”. The writer, actress and theater director, born on August 10, 1946 in Malatya (Turkey), who visited the still divided Berlin for the first time in 1965, has “enriched the German-language literary scene with her novels, stories and plays for more than three decades, most recently with the opus magnum ‘ A space bordered by shadows'”, the jury’s statement reads: “Unusual literary stylistic devices and ways of speaking inspired by Turkish characterize her multi-perspective texts, which, in addition to intimate personal experiences, unfold a broad panorama of German-Turkish history – from the First World War to the A spirit of optimism from the sixties and seventies to the present day.” Özdamar’s work opens up “a dialogue that is both intellectual and poetic between different languages, cultures and worldviews, in which we can participate in reading.”
Source: Nachrichten
