Anna Seghers-Preis 2026

Sonja M. Schultz and Daniela Catrileo will each receive the Anna Seghers Prize 2026, endowed with 12,500 euros.

The prize is awarded to one author each from the German-speaking world and Latin America, the cultural region of Anna Seghers' exile. Like Anna Seghers, the honorees should have the desire to contribute to a fairer, more humane society through the means of art. Alexander Graeff and Andrea Garcès were responsible for selecting the two prizewinners this time.

The prizewinners

Sonja M. Schultz (*1975 in Pinneberg) is a writer, journalist and spoken word performer based in Berlin. She studied theater studies, cultural communication and art history at Humboldt University in Berlin and completed her doctorate in 2011 on the representation of National Socialism and the Holocaust in film. Her award-winning dissertation was published as a film-historical study. Since 2006, she has been working as a freelance journalist on film, media and the culture of remembrance and curates film series. She also works internationally as a lecturer and workshop leader. She has been performing spoken word texts since 2009. Her debut Hundesohn was published in 2019, followed by Mauerpogo in 2025. She received the Harder Literature Prize for Luke 5 in 2020.

Daniela Catrileo (*1987 in Santiago de Chile) is a Mapuche poet, artist and activist and co-founder of the Colectivo Mapuche-Feminista Rangiñtulewfü. She studied philosophy, education and cultural journalism and completed a master's degree in American aesthetics. She is a professor of philosophy and is involved in artistic and political contexts of the Mapuche diaspora. Catrileo is a member of the editorial board of Yene and co-editor of Traytrayko. In her texts, she combines different forms with questions of identity, migration, feminism and decoloniality. She was awarded the Santiago City Prize for Literature for Guerra florida (2019) and Chilco (2024).

Anna Seghers Foundation

In her will, the writer Anna Seghers stipulated that the royalties from her works should be used to support young artists from the GDR and Latin American countries. From 1986 to 1994, the Academy of Arts of the GDR, and later the writer's children - Pierre and Ruth Radvanyi - awarded annual scholarships. In 1995, the Anna Seghers Foundation was established, which has awarded the Anna Seghers Prize ever since.

• Anna Seghers Foundation - information and previous award winners

Anna Seghers Museum

The Anna Seghers Museum at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin-Adlershof opens the writer's apartment, which has been preserved in its original state and houses her estate library with around 10,000 volumes and many personal mementos, to interested visitors.

Award ceremony with the prizewinners Sonja M. Schultz and Daniela Catrileo, as well as the jurors Alexander Graeff and Andrea Garcés