On June 16, Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya received the Günther Grass Prize, awarded in the German city of Lübeck. The cash payment attached to it is €10,000, reported on the website of the prize organizing committee.
This prize is awarded every two years in memory of the German writer and Nobel Prize winner Günther Grass, who spent the last years of his life near Lübeck. He himself founded the From Writers to Writers award, which was given in 2011-2019, and after Grass’s death in 2015 it was renamed in his honor.
The basic principle for choosing the winners has remained the same: decisions are made by the jury, which includes only writers, and mainly from the Lübeck Literary Encounters group, that is, people sharing the same ideas and students of Grass himself. The monetary component emerged after the award was renamed at the suggestion of city authorities, who finance the award fund.
Ulitskaya became the first foreign winner of the award in its entire history, including the From Writers to Writers award. The jury said in a statement that the prize was awarded for the “hope, humor and courage” with which Ulitskaya challenges “the tyranny of the past and present”.
The jury did not single out specific works, explaining that all of her work as a whole honors the prize and calling her “one of the most important writers of modern Russia”.
“Using different writing techniques, Ulitskaya dilutes plots with anecdotes and descriptions of living characters, combining them into a broad picture of society – either as a grotesque, or as an example of masterful realism, or as a description epic of an era”, note the members of the jury in their speech.
The award was presented to Ulitskaya on the evening of June 16 at the Lübeck City Library. The evening program also included a reading of the writer’s works, a small musical program and a reception in the garden of the house of Günter Grass, a museum where the originals of many of his artistic and literary works are kept.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya is 80 years old. After the start of the military operation in Ukraine, she left Russia and has since lived in Berlin. The writer spoke out against the actions of the Russian authorities, saying that “this is a political crime that will later be described in the history books.”
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