Ingeborg Bachmann Prize awarded to Kathrin Passig

signandsight has yet again done an excellent job in gathering and summing up the various reports on the recently awarded Ingeborg Bachmann prize. Below there summary in English with a range of links to the original German articles:

The three-day Ingeborg Bachmann competition took place from Thursday to Saturday in the Austrian town of Klagenfurt. Writers read from unpublished works in a quest for Austria’s most prestigious literary award, worth 25,000 Euros. This year Kathrin Passig won both the main prize and the “public’s prize”. Other awards went to Bodo E. Hell, Norbert Scheuer and Angelika Overath.

Paul Jandl of the NZZ enjoyed his weekend at Klagenfurt, but found the texts almost too good. “There are still the typical Klagenfurt texts. But this time, the economic under- and over-classes outnumbered the largest marginal group, the I’s. There are no more self-reflective texts, rather examinations of the Hartz IV milieu (Claudia Klischat), the penitentiary inmate (Clemens Meyer) or the key account manager (Andreas Merkel). There’s not much lacking in the texts, aside from the fact that their craft is so perfect it’s almost boring. These texts are not beyond critique, they’re made for critique.”

Elmar Krekeler writes in Die Welt, “An icy wind of serenity blows over the texts. They go at the world from a distance. They don’t want to burn themselves. Somewhere, one thinks, something should shine, in the characters, hopefully in the authors. Please don’t leave me so in peace. Move me, excite me, knock me off my feet if you have to. But nobody does.” With the exception of the winning text by Kathrin Passig. “A dead funny thriller. A literary parable, a life parable. A picture of the world. A discovery. This is the world in which we find ourselves. Full of stray, desperate jokes.”

For Passig, an online journalist (website here) and non-fiction writer, the story of a fight for survival in a winter storm was a first foray into fiction. In an interview with the FAZ online, Passig explains that she decided to participate in the competition after attending it last year as an audience member. “Based on my observations last year, I decided it should definitely not be a funny text, it shouldn’t be about problems in a relationship and it should not contain bad dialogue.” Passig, surprised by her listenter’s mirth at her reading, “tried to look sternly at the audience. I’m talking about people dying! Maybe the video that introduced me had put them in a laughing mood.”