The City of Leipzig awards the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding () which has been given since 1994.
The award is endowed with prize money of 20,000 Euro and is presented every year during the official opening of
Leipzig Book Fair
The Leipzig Book Fair (german: Leipziger Buchmesse) is the second largest book fair in Germany after the Frankfurt Book Fair. The fair takes place annually over four days at the Leipzig Trade Fairground in the northern part of Leipzig, Saxony. ...
.
Recipients
Source:
Ryszard Kapuściński
Ryszard Kapuściński (; 4 March 1932 – 23 January 2007) was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in bo ...
(Poland)
* 1994 Eckhard Thiele (Germany)
* 1995 Péter Nádas
Péter Nádas (born 14 October 1942) is a Hungarian writer, playwright, and essayist.
Biography
He was born in Budapest into a Jewish family, the son of László Nádas (originally Nussbaum) and Klára Tauber. After the takeover of the Hunga ...
(Hungary)
* 1995 Svetlana Geier (Germany)
* 1996 Aleksandar Tišma
Aleksandar Tišma ( sr-cyr, Александар Тишма; 16 January 1924 – 15 February 2003) was a Serbian novelist.
Biography
Tišma was born in Horgoš, Kanjiža on the present-day border of Serbia and Hungary, to a Serbian father and a ...
(Serbia)
* 1996 Fritz Mierau (Germany)
* 1997 Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész (; 9 November 192931 March 2016) was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was ...
(Hungary)
* 1997 Antonín J. Liehm
Antonín Jaroslav Liehm (2 March 1924 – 4 December 2020) was a Czechoslovakia, Czech-born writer, publisher, translator, and scholar residing in Paris.
In 1984, Antonín J. Liehm founded the European culture magazine ''Lettre International''. ...
(Czech Republic)
* 1998 Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich (born 31 May 1948) is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suf ...
(Belarus)
* 1998 Ilma Rakusa
Ilma Rakusa (born 2 January 1946) is a Swiss writer and translator. She translates French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian into German.
Biography
Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia to a Slovenian father and a Hunga ...
(Switzerland)
* 1998 Andreas Tretner (Germany)
* 1999 Eric Hobsbawm (United Kingdom)
* 1999 Nenad Popović (Serbia)
* 2000 Hanna Krall
Hanna Krall (born 1935), is a Polish writer with a degree in journalism from the University of Warsaw, specializing among other subjects in the history of the Holocaust in occupied Poland.
Personal life
Krall is of Jewish origin, the daughter of ...
(Poland)
* 2000 Peter Urban (Germany)
* 2001 Claudio Magris
Claudio Magris (born 10 April 1939) is an Italian scholar, translator and writer. He was a senator for Friuli-Venezia Giulia from 1994 to 1996.
Life
Magris graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a ...
(Italy)
* 2001 Norbert Randow (Germany)
* 2002 Bora Ćosić
Bora Ćosić (born 5 April 1932) is a Serbian, Croatian and Yugoslav novelist, essayist, translator, public intellectual, and dissident. He wrote about 50 books, as well as several theater plays, which were played with great success in the Belgr ...
(Serbia)
* 2002 Ludvík Kundera
Ludvík Kundera (22 March 1920 – 17 August 2010) was a Czech writer, translator, poet, playwright, editor and literary historian. He was a notable exponent of the Czech avant-garde literature and a prolific translator of German authors. In 20 ...
(Czech Republic)
* 2003 Hugo Claus
Hugo Maurice Julien Claus (; 5 April 1929 – 19 March 2008) was a leading Belgian literature, Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, a ...
(Belgium)
* 2003 Barbara Antkowiak (Germany)
* 2004 Dževad Karahasan
Dževad Karahasan (born 25 January 1953) is a Bosnian writer, essayist and philosopher. Karahasan was awarded with Herder Prize and Goethe Medal for his writings.
In 2020, the city of Frankfurt awarded him the Goethe Prize.
Early life
Karahas ...
(Bosnia and Herzegovina)
* 2004 Gábor Csordás (Hungary)
* 2005 Slavenka Drakulić
Slavenka Drakulić (born July 4, 1949) is a Croatian journalist, novelist, and essayist whose works on feminism, communism, and post-communism have been translated into many languages.
Biography
Drakulić was born in Rijeka, Croatia (at that ti ...
(Croatia)
* 2006 Yurii Andrukhovych
Yurii Ihorovych Andrukhovych ( uk, Юрій Ігорович Андрухович) is a Ukrainian prose writer, poet, essayist, and translator.
Biography
In 1985, Andrukhovych co-founded the Bu-Ba-Bu poetic group, which stands for «burlesque ...
(Ukraine)
* 2007 Gerd Koenen (Germany)
* 2007 Michail Ryklin (Russia)
* 2008 Geert Mak (Netherlands)
* 2009 Karl Schlögel
Karl Schlögel (born 7 March 1948 in Hawangen
Hawangen is a municipality in the district of Unterallgäu in Bavaria, Germany, with about 1,254 inhabitants. Hawangen is situated east of Memmingen. The town has a municipal association with ...
(Germany)
* 2010 György Dalos
György Dalos (born 23 September 1943) is a Hungarian Jewish writer and historian. He is best known for his novel ''1985'', and ''The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin''.
Life
Dalos was born in Budapest and spent his childh ...
(Hungary)
* 2011 Martin Pollack (Austria)
* 2012 Ian Kershaw
Sir Ian Kershaw (born 29 April 1943) is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is pa ...
(United Kingdom)
* 2012 Timothy D. Snyder
Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute f ...
(United States)
* 2013 Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Germany)
* 2014 Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra FRSL (born 1969) is an Indian essayist and novelist. He was awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2014.
Early life and education
Mishra was born in Jhansi, India. His father was a railway worker and trade unioni ...
(India)
* 2015 Mircea Cărtărescu
Mircea Cărtărescu (; born 1 June 1956) is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic, and essayist.
Biography
Born in Bucharest in 1956, he attended Cantemir Vodă National College during the early 1970s. During his sch ...
(Romania)Heinrich August Winkler
Heinrich August Winkler (born 19 December 1938 in Königsberg) is a German historian.
With his mother he joined the westward flight in 1944, after which he grew up in southern Germany, attending a Gymnasium in Ulm. He then studied history, pol ...
(Germany)
* 2017 Mathias Énard
Mathias Énard (born 1972) is a French novelist. He studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for about fifteen years, interrupted in 2013 by a writing residency in Berlin. He won several awa ...
(France)
* 2018 Åsne Seierstad
Åsne Seierstad (born 10 February 1970) is a Norwegian freelance journalist and writer, best known for her accounts of everyday life in war zones – most notably Kabul after 2001, Baghdad in 2002 and the ruined Grozny in 2006. (in Norwegian)
Pe ...
(Norway)
* 2019 Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen (born 13 January 1967) is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator and activist who has been an outspoken critic of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the former president of the United States, Donald Trump.
Gess ...
(United States/Russia)Maria Stepanova
Maria Alexandrovna Stepanova (russian: Мари́я Алекса́ндровна Степа́нова; born 23 February 1979) is a Russian professional and Olympic basketball player. In the United States, she played for the Phoenix ...
(Russia)
References
External links
Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding
official website
{{German literary awards
German-language literary awards
Awards established in 1994
Fiction awards
Events in Leipzig