Shortlisted for the German Book Award 2021

The six shortlist candidates have just been announced and schøne agentur represents translation rigths for four of them! Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to have a closer look at:

Mithu M. Sanyal, IDENTITTI (Hanser) – It’s the 2020s and things are complicated. Then there’s a scandal: Prof. Saraswati is a white woman – and nothing could be worse. Because she holds the chair of Postcolonial Studies in Düsseldorf and is the supreme goddess of identity debates, in which she describes herself as a person of colour. Never before has a story of the present day been so fast-paced and told with such ease.

Antje Rávik Strubel, BLUE WOMAN (S. Fischer) – Antje Rávik Strubel’s novel ‚Blue Woman‘, tells in a stirring way of the unequal premises of love, Europe’s abysses and how we normalise the monstrous. Rendered invisible by a sexual assault which no one takes seriously, Adina gets stranded in Helsinki after wandering around aimlessly. In the hotel in which she is working illegally, she meets the Estonian Professor Leonides, a Member of the European Parliament, who falls in love with her. While he campaigns for human rights, Adina searches for a way out of her inner exile.

Norbert Gstrein, THE SECOND JACOB (Hanser) – Jacob recalls doing a film shoot years ago on the Mexican-American border. He remembers women being murdered and the terrible conditions in general, but he only ever witnessed these things from afar. Twice, however, he found himself in the middle of sinister events. Jacob is ashamed and struggles with the simplistic verdicts of the outside world.

Monika Helfer, DADDY (Hanser) – Monika Helfer continues the tale she began in The Riff-Raff – the one of her family. Helfer’s book orbits her father’s life and tells the story of her childhood and adolescence – the spaciousness and library in the mountain recovery home for war victims and the poverty and the cramped conditions in a South Tyrolean settlement with many children in one kitchen. She writes what she knows about her father, a man who, like many of his generation, didn’t say much.

https://www.deutscher-buchpreis.de/nominiert