25,000 euros

Cucumber war and trouble spot

Bachmann Prize winner Tijan Sila embraces "his" juror Philipp Tingler

(Bild: [e-mail])

Klagenfurt: On Sunday, a long-suffering few days of German-language literature came to an end at the ORF Theater. The Bachmann Prize went to Tijan Sila from Sarajevo.

The transgenerational transmission of crises and traumas is unusually omnipresent at this 48th edition - and the "Krone" prediction of the prizewinners is usually spot on. So it's no surprise that Johanna Sebauer takes a winning bite out of "Das Gurkerl". The 36-year-old Viennese, who catapults Austria back into the prize race with her ludicrous satire, is awarded the 3sat Prize (€7,500) and the BKS Bank Audience Prize (€7,000 including a Klagenfurt City Writer's Scholarship worth €6,000) for her parade through social outrage and inflammatory mechanisms.

Double victory: Johanna Sebauer from Vienna with Herta Stockbauer

(Bild: [e-mail])

It was clear (to us) that both Tamara Štajner and Tijan Sila would take part in the word arena. The invocation of the mother full of anger, pain and tenderness in the context of heroes and injustice in the former Yugoslavia gives the 36-year-old Slovenian "air downwards" and a boost in the Kelag Prize (€10,000).

Text about the effects of war
The high-flyer, however, is Sila: the teacher and author, who was born in Sarajevo in 1981 and now lives in Germany, uses an autofictional, tragicomic, laconic and brutal approach to the effects of the Bosnian war for "Tag, an dem meine Mutter verrückt wurde" ("The Day My Mother Went Mad"), in which his first-person narrator vehemently confronts the intergenerational threat. Result: Ingeborg Bachmann Prize of the City of Klagenfurt (€25,000).

Culture in a nutshell

• From 3 to 12 July, a "spectrum" of diverse expressive possibilities will cover Villach's town hall square and city center for the festival of the same name, where dance, theater and performance will come together for an anniversary celebration - artistically directed by Martin Dueller.
• "In cooperation with Vicino/Lontano, the Unikum is exploring the paths of Europe between Italy, Slovenia and Carinthia. The project will make a stop at the Magdalensberg Archaeology Park on July 3 and at the Peršmanhof on July 5. Information at: eforeurope.eu/en

A search in a DIY store for the "possibility of order" embedded in loss earns 37-year-old Denis Pfabe from Bonn the Deutschlandfunk Prize (€12,500). The question remains as to why Henrik Szántó's brilliant Ghost House came away empty-handed, combined with the joy of 2025 and the 49th dip into the Wörtersee on Lake Wörthersee.