Recently, in the FAZ, Oliver Jungen opined that Germany has more prizes than authors. Let’s expand that to include the rest of the German-speaking world and in particular the bizarre Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis that is held in Klagenfurt every June (of course, several other prizes are presented at the same time). Andrew Hammel picked up on this in German Joys.

Let Wikipedia speak:

The prize winner is determined during a three-day reading marathon in which 18 previously-selected candidates vie to impress both the audience and the nine member professional jury. An award of €22,500 accompanies the prize.

It’s an amazing TV marathon. Slaughter by jury is more civilized than it was a few years ago. For some years now it’s also been possible to read the texts online and watch the entries later. There are pompous little films showing the writers in their supposed home environment, beautifully parodied by the video clip for the 2006 winner Kathrin Passig.

But now the Bachmann Prize is going to present several language versions of the texts online. For details, in German, see here.

Official Bachmannpreis page. There’s also a literature translation prize called Translatio. Some bits are in English, but we must keep an eye out for the translations of the texts themselves.

(Via Markus at textundblog.de – who was greatly impressed by the Portuguese entry to the Eurovision Song Contest (I only liked the Croatians))