Oswald Egger receives the 2024 Georg Büchner Prize

The Akademie Schloss Solitude congratulates former fellow Oswald Egger (literature, 1996) on being awarded the 2024 Georg Büchner Prize by the German Academy for Language and Literature. The prize is endowed with 50,000 euros and was presented on November 2, 2024, in Darmstadt.

Statement of the Jury:
»With Oswald Egger, the German Academy for Language and Literature honors a writer who, since his first publication in 1993, has transcended and expanded the boundaries of literary production. He is crafting a continuum of work that conceives of language as movement, sound, texture, image, and performance, evolving through the continuation and transformation of language use. His prose poems and text weavings resist quick reading, inviting associative decoding of meanings and playfully undermining explanatory systems we think we know. Egger’s cosmos of words is rooted in the multilingualism and landscapes of his South Tyrolean origins. Through the thread of sensory perception and his journeys across the lexical fields of the German language and its varieties, Oswald Egger continues the great tradition of a physiognomy of natural forms, from stones to clouds. The world contained within his work eludes possession, as his textual landscapes point to the unpossessable quality of art.«

Oswald Egger, born 1963 in Lana near Merano/South Tyrol, lives and works as an author at the Raketenstation Hombroich near Neuss and in Vienna. Since 2011, he has been Professor of Language and Form at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel. In 2013, he held the Thomas Kling Poetics Lectureship at the University of Bonn, and in 2003 he was a guest professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Egger’s books have been translated into several languages, and his work has received numerous awards, including the Clemens Brentano Prize (2000), H.C. Artmann Prize (2006), Peter Huchel Prize (2007), Oskar Pastior Prize (2010), Georg Trakl Prize for Poetry (2017), and Ernst Jandl Poetry Prize (2019). He is a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, and the German Academy for Language and Literature.

The Georg Büchner Prize:
Since 1951, the German Academy for Language and Literature has awarded the Georg Büchner Prize to outstanding writers. For more information, visit www.deutscheakademie.de and www.buechnerpreis.de.

The prize is funded by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media, the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art, and the City of Darmstadt.