Würth Prize for Literature

In October 2018, Carola Gruber and Yael Inokai were awarded the 29th Würth Prize for Literature by the Würth Foundation. The prize is endowed with a total of EUR 7,500 and has been awarded in cooperation with the University of Tübingen since 1996. Author Håkan Nesser presented the topic of the call for submissions during his Tübingen Poetry Professorship at the University of Tübingen in 2017. It was: “A yellow shoe.” The Würth Prize for Literature is a prize created for the next generation of authors. The prize is awarded to works of prose of around 10,000 characters that convincingly use language in a novel way. The texts are presented to the jury anonymously. 83 texts were submitted. Carola Gruber from Munich received the first prize of EUR 5,000 for her text “Schon gut” (“Enough Already”). “Even though the story is told in an emphatically factual way, almost recorded, we are on unsafe ground, because the ground seems to give way again and again and the story almost vibrates,” noted Thomas Scheuffelen, member of the jury, in his laudation. The second prize of EUR 2,500 went to Yael Inokai from Berlin for her short story “Der Ausländer” (“The Foreigner”).

The award-winning texts, along with selected works from the remaining submissions, were included in an anthology published by the German publishing house Swiridoff-Verlag.