How can the loss of speech and orientation resulting from a brain injury be communicated to other people? How can such a traumatic experience be dealt with in a novel? Kathrin Schmidt, a qualified psychologist, editor and social scientist born in Gotha, eastern Germany, in 1958, has succeeded in doing just that. Moreover, in such an outstanding way that the respective book, Du stirbst nicht, won the 2009 German Book Prize in a field of 153 other competitors. The author was presented with the award at the start of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair on 12 October 2009. The German Publishers & Booksellers Association, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, awards the Book Prize each year for what it considers to be the best novel published in the German language. The German Book Prize is worth 25,000 euros.
“The novel tells the story of a world regained. Syllable by syllable, sentence by sentence, the heroine seeks to find her lost speech, her lost memory, having woken up out of a coma following a brain haemorrhage. With great linguistic force and in a tone that is sometimes laconic, sometimes derisive, sometimes uncanny, the novel depicts the heroine’s inner world, thus enabling the history of her family, her marriage and an unanticipated, incredible love to emerge from within,” so the jury’s justification of its choice. The world that Kathrin Schmidt meticulously pieces together includes the declining GDR and the years between German reunification and the start of the new millennium. “This individual story of a return from the periphery of death is thus unobtrusively and masterfully located in the resonance-chamber of eastern Germany’s historical and political turnaround,” the justification continues. Kathrin Schmidt has already received a number of literary prizes: her 1998 novel The Gunnar-Lennefsen Expedition was acknowledged, among others, with an award in the prestigious Ingeborg-Bachmann competition. The author lives in Berlin.
