Author and journalist Martin Becker has been awarded the "Margarete Schrader Prize for Literature", worth 8,000 euros, by Paderborn University. At the award ceremony in the Deelenhaus in Paderborn, the jury praised his "cosmopolitan prose", which "creates spaces of remembrance in the wake of world literature and, with its very own tone, intones a literary local history that reconnects past and present". Prof. Birgitt Riegraf, President of Paderborn University, and Prof. Iris Kruse, Chair of the Institute of German and Comparative Literature, gave welcoming speeches. In his laudatory speech, the chairman of the prize jury, Prof. Norbert Eke, praised Becker's novels as "atmospherically dense excavations in the 'original soil' of German history on the basis of his own family history".
In his acceptance speech, the author himself referred to his origins in a working-class family from the Ruhr and Sauerland regions. Becker has published radio plays such as "Lost in Praha" and "V?ter haben sieben Leben," volumes of short stories and essays as well as novels such as "Marschmusik" (2017) and "Kleinstadtfarben" (2021). The ceremony ended with a reading from his latest novel "Die Arbeiter" (2024), which was accompanied by Ulrich Lettermann from the Paderborn University's music department.
The Margarete Schrader Prize for Literature is the only major literary prize to be awarded by a university. It is named after the Paderborn University writer Margarete Schrader (1914-2001), who left funds for the promotion of literature in the Westphalia region to the university in her will. After Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Judith Kuckart, Kevin Vennemann, Martin Heckmanns, J?rg Albrecht and Michael Roes, Becker is the seventh winner of the prize, which was awarded for the first time in 2003.
This text was translated automatically.
