Novelist Lutz Seiler to receive the Georg Büchner Prize

"Melancholy, urgent, sincere" — that's how the jury of the German Academy for Language and Literature described Lutz Seiler's writing style. The author has found his own unmistakable voice, they added. With Lutz Seiler, the Georg Büchner Prize honors an author "who began with illustrious volumes of poetry, from there found his way to narrative storytelling, but who always remains a poet as clear as he is enigmatic and darkly luminous."

Seiler's success is closely linked to his background, which plays a major role in his work.
He was born in 1963 in the former East Germany, in the Thuringian city of Gera. The village where he grew up was demolished, and its inhabitants forcibly relocated. Seiler's home was humble, and, as he later put it, "utterly unartistic." He has described his childhood as being permeated by a sense of heaviness, exhaustion and absence.

A love of literature

Seiler trained as a construction worker at that same time, and earned a living as a carpenter. During his mandatory military service, he discovered literature, a welcome distraction from a reality that was more gray than colorful.

He began writing at around the same, primarily poems. After the military, he attended university in Halle, studying history and German. He continued with his own writing and published his first essays and books of poetry, later short stories and novels. Seiler received his first literary award in 1999. In 2007, he won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for the short story collection "Turksib."

Breakthrough with Kruso

Yet Seiler remained a bit of an insider's tip until completing his first novel, Kruso, in 2014. Inspired by his own experiences, it traces the last months of East Germany, from a completely new perspective.

Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Baltic island of Hiddensee was a kind of refuge for East Germans who were at odds with the system — artists, intellectuals, freethinkers — but also for dropouts who found a small piece of freedom on the island, which is located to the west of the island of Rügen and was part of East Germany's national territory. Many also tried to flee across the Baltic Sea to the west, to Denmark. A few were successful, but many more drowned, died of hypothermia or were shot by East German border guards.

Island adventure and a coming-of-age story

In the summer of 1989, Lutz Seiler was in his mid-twenties and working as a dishwasher at a restaurant on Hiddensee. In Kruso, that dishwasher is the dropout Edgar Bendler, who has wound up on Hiddensee after a personal tragedy. There he meets Alexander Krusowitsch, nicknamed "Kruso," who serves as a kind of spiritual guide to those who flee to the island. The two quickly form an close friendship. But autumn 1989 brings the end of East Germany, sending shockwaves through the island's population. In the end, there's a life-or-death struggle.

The literary world was delighted. Kruso won the 2014 German Book Prize, and then everything changed for Lutz Seiler. His novel was a bestseller, was translated into 25 languages, and won many more awards.

A front-row seat to a time of upheaval

In 2020, he published his next novel, Star 111. It takes place the years following the fall of the Wall and German reunification, in the resulting no-man's-land between the German states that were laboriously growing together. A married couple builds a new life in the former West Germany, while their son makes his way through the Berlin squatter scene. This book, too, earned rave reviews, such as one that called it an "uncommonly touching piece of literature on the subject of the fall of the Berlin Wall." Once again, Seiler drew on his own life for his fiction. When the Wall fell, Seiler was living in East Berlin.

That was where he experienced the fall of the Wall, and the resulting anarchic and chaotic years, when largely young people flocked to the neighborhoods of the former East Berlin, squatting abandoned buildings and filling them with bars, punk music and graffiti.

Star 111 earned Seiler the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. And in 2023, the author was honored with the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Bertolt Brecht Prize, and the Berlin Literature Prize. The crowning glory is now the Georg Büchner Prize, which will be awarded to Seiler on November 4, 2023, in Darmstadt. That's the home of the German Academy for Language and Literature, which awards the prize to German-language authors. It was named after German dramatist and revolutionary Georg Büchner, who was born in 1813.

Lutz Seiler himself calls the prize "a great encouragement for (his) own writing." He joins the ranks of previous winners such as Max Frisch, Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll.

This article has been adapted from German.