The Chilean writer Enrique Winter and the Leipzig author Marlen Hobrack have been awarded this year's Anna Seghers Prize. It is endowed with 12,500 euros each. The Anna Seghers Foundation awards the prize to young authors from the German-speaking world and Latin America. The prize will be awarded on June 7 at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz.
Born in 1982, Enrique Winter is one of the most outstanding Spanish-language poets of his generation, according to jury member Victoria Torres. With his novel "Sobre nosotros callaremos" (We will be silent about us), he has written a book in the spirit of Seghers' novels "Transit" and "The Seventh Cross". It deals with the cultural uprooting and love stories of the author's Polish grandmother, who fled to Latin America to escape National Socialism.
Hobrack, born in Bautzen in 1986, made her debut as a novelist in 2023 with "Schrödinger's Grrrl" (Verbrecher Verlag). Her most recent non-fiction book, "Erbgut" (Harper Collins), was published in 2024, in which she tells how she breaks up her mother's apartment and comes to terms with her relationship with her. With classism, Hobrack addresses an important political topic in an original literary form, said juror Jörg-Philipp Thomsa according to the press release.
