Overview
- Krechel accepted the €50,000 award from the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung at the Staatstheater Darmstadt on November 1.
- In her acceptance speech, she recalled victims of political violence, saying, "Writing means thinking the death, the violent death, remembering life-conditions that kill."
- Author Sabine Küchler delivered the laudation, portraying Krechel’s narrators as marked by familial and political history.
- The jury cited a body of work that probes exile, flight, violence and feminism, highlighting her 2008–2018 trilogy Shanghai fern von wo, Landgericht and Geisterbahn.
- Concurrent honors went to historian Dan Diner with the Sigmund-Freud-Preis and to Ilma Rakusa with the Johann-Heinrich-Merck-Preis for literary criticism.