Kleist-Preis

In the organizer's words:

The Kleist Prize of the Year 2023 goes to the writer and musician Thomas Kunst, born in Stralsund in 1965. In keeping with the tradition of the Kleist Prize, author Feridun Zaimoglu - as the person of trust elected by the jury of the Heinrich von Kleist Society - has taken sole responsibility for choosing Thomas Kunst as the prize winner. His justification reads:

"Thomas Kunst is the most language-obsessed and heart-crazy German poet of our time. In his poems and novels he dares to break with the usual and the same. In his northern stubbornness, he defies imagined boundaries: he is East German and worldly, brilliant and resistant to the present. He can weave wreaths of sonnets just as well and powerfully as he can illustrate the famously insignificant nature of happiness in poems (for example, in the poetry collections Die Arbeiterin auf dem Eis , 2013, or Kolonien und Manschettenknöpfe , 2017).He never allows himself to be seduced by the compulsion to be current. A fantastic extremist, he also succeeds masterfully in the struggle against ordinary metaphor. His verses shine because he knows reality in its beautiful details. It is no accident that he reveres Thomas Brasch and Nicolas Born. Anyone who reads Thomas Kunst will love not wanting to do without his words."

The Kleist Prize is endowed with 20,000 euros and is sponsored by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and the states of Berlin and Brandenburg. Further information at: www.heinrich-von-kleist-gesellschaft.de This content has been machine translated.