The Siegfried Lenz Foundation has just confirmed that Norbert Gstrein is the winner of the Siegfried Lenz Prize. The prize is intended to honor international writers who have gained recognition through their narrative work and whose creative achievements are close in spirit to those of Siegfried Lenz.
The jury states:
“Already in his debut, the novella Einer (1988), Norbert Gstrein proved himself to be an author who independently continues the tradition of classical modernist literature while consistently developing its motifs and themes further. His body of work, comprising around twenty novels and essays, revolves around major epistemological and moral questions. It deals with ‘identity,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘guilt.’ At the same time, Gstrein confronts his readers with the fact that everything narrated must be treated with skepticism, that there are no certainties, and that simple causalities are only apparent causalities.”
“Intellectual Clarity and Stylistic Brilliance”
The prose of Norbert Gstrein deals with the aspects of life that cannot be fully grasped or fixed, within the context of the historical ruptures and catastrophes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. According to the jury, these narrative strands are woven together in an exemplary and masterful way in Gstrein’s most recent novel, Im ersten Licht, “which can be read both as a major anti-war novel and as a reflection on the guilt that people take upon themselves, willingly or unwillingly.”
The statement also emphasizes that the award honors in Norbert Gstrein an author whose texts are marked by an intellectual clarity and stylistic brilliance rarely found in contemporary German-language literature.
Norbert Gstrein, born in Tyrol in 1961, lives in Hamburg. Among other distinctions, he has received the Alfred Döblin Prize, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literary Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Austrian Book Prize 2019, the Düsseldorf Literary Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize.