9th Internationaler Literaturpreis

Award winners 2017

Author Fiston Mwanza Mujila and translators Katharina Meyer and Lena Müller are the winners of the ninth Internationaler Literaturpreis for translated contemporary literatures for the novel Tram 83 in its first German translation.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila receives a prize of 20,000 €, Katharina Meyer and Lena Müller receive a prize of 15,000 €.

“Tram 83 is the rhapsodic novel of 36-year-old Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, who lives and works in Graz. It is a radical report on post-colonial African life in a town built over an immense store of very valuable natural resources. Fiston Mwanza Mujila chants, roars, whispers sentences about everyday life in a male society dominated by violence with a radical furor, almost in passing narrating the tale of a crook and of the unlikely salvation of a doomed poet. The translators Katharina Meyer and Lena Müller have found a stirring language for the text that pushes towards the performative.” — The Jury

Reclaim Your Fictions.

This is the theme of the Celebration of the Shortlist & Award Ceremony, which will gather the shortlisted authors and translators along with the award winning trio on July 6, 2017 beginning at 6 pm. With the jury and other guests, they will undertake literary investigations of the present, present the shortlisted titles in readings, conversations on literary materials and offer insights into contexts and concurrent originating processes. In roundtable studies on the spaces surrounding narrating and translating they will debate the value of fiction in post-factual times. The prize will be awarded as part of this celebration with a laudatory address and presentation of the book.