Overview

• The Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung named Ursula Krechel the 2025 Georg-Büchner-Preis laureate, which carries a €50,000 endowment.
• The award ceremony will take place on November 1, 2025, at the Staatstheater Darmstadt.
• The jury highlighted Krechel’s poems, dramas, radio plays, novels and essays for confronting the devastations of German history and the hardness of the present.
• Her research-based trilogy—Shanghai fern von wo (2008), Landgericht (2012) and Geisterbahn (2018)—narrates the expulsion and persecution of Jews and Sinti and the enduring experience of exile.
• Recurring themes in Krechel’s work include flight, exile, violence and feminism, underpinned by a continuous thread of women’s self-assertion and rediscovery.