Xaver Bayer receives the Austrian Book Award

The Austrian Book Prize was awarded for the fifth time on Monday. Xaver Bayer convinced the jury with his book “Stories with Marianne “(Verlag Jung und Jung).

AUSTRIA. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this time the winner was not announced live at an event at the Vienna casino on Schwarzenbergplatz, but by broadcast. The award-winning Xaver Bayer was born in Vienna in 1977 and studied philosophy and German. The jury sees in his 20 stories, which usually begin harmlessly, but then from grotesque to cruel, “a brilliant and multifaceted reflection of our time.” Bayer would illuminate the ghastly spaces of our time with an angry, often melancholic joke, “because your hero repeatedly plunges into chaos, which is featured in luminous details; in the end, he only has his own imagination as a place to save.”

Leander Fischer Debut Award

The Austrian Book Prize is organized by the responsible Federal Ministry, the Main Austrian Book Trade Association and the Vienna Chamber of Labor. The award is endowed with 20,000 euros. The debut prize endowed with 10,000 euros goes to the young man from Upper Austria Leander Fischer. He convinced with his first novel “Die Forelle” (Wallstein Verlag). For an excerpt from this, the author, born in Vöcklabruck in 1992, was awarded the Deutschlandfunk Prize in 2019 during the reading competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. “In his debut novel of almost 800 pages, Leander Fischer proves to be an extremely eloquent writer”, the jury justified their decision. He was able to immerse himself in the smallest details of fly fishing throughout several pages and at the same time set off to linguistic heights. You can also use “Trout”. read like an anti-homeland novel, “with the reserve fraternity of dying or savagely fenced forest and the corresponding haze of beer as thematic background noise.”

Previous prizes of the Austrian Book Prize went to Friederike Mayröcker (2016), Eva Menasse (2017), Daniel Wisser (2018) and Norbert Gstrein (2019).