European Literature Prize 2021

At the entrance you are requested to show your coronavirus pass.

This event can also be attended online.

Herkunft/Herkomst was selected by a professional jury from a longlist consisting of twenty novels translated from nine languages. In this autobiographical novel, Stanišić meticulously dissects what happened during his flight to Germany while narrating his family history.

The European Literature Prize celebrates the best novel translated last year from a European language into Dutch. The prize honours both the author and the translator of the chosen title, with the author receiving the sum of €10,000 and the translator €5,000. The European Literature Prize is an initiative of the Academic-Cultural Centre SPUI25, the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and Athenaeum Boekhandels. It is financed by the Lira Fonds, the De Lancey & De La Hanty Foundation and the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Saša Stanišić and Annemarie Vlaming will receive the European Literature Prize at the next day, Saturday November 6 at the Crossing Border festival in Den Haag. Find more info here.

About the speakers

Saša Stanišić is a Bosnian-German writer. He was born in Višegrad (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in 1978. In the spring of 1992, he fled alongside his family to Germany as a refugee of the Bosnian War, because his mother is Muslim and his father a Christian. In 2019 Stanišic won the Deutscher Buchpreis with his novel Herkunft. The book was published in Dutch (Herkomst) in October 2020 by the publishing house Ambo|Anthos. Ambo|Anthos also published the Dutch editions of Stanišic’s earlier novels: Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (Hoe de soldaat de grammofoon repareert, 2007) and Vor dem Fest (Nacht voor het feest, 2014). NRC Handelsblad wrote about Vor dem Fest: ‘A sizzling and funny Heimat novel from one of the biggest talents in contemporary German literature.’

Annemarie Vlaming studied German Language and Literature, specialising in Translation. Since 2005 she has been translating fiction from German into Dutch, having now translated more than 30 books including novels by Juli Zeh, Eva Menasse, Daniela Krien, Beatrice Meier and Alain Claude Sulzer. From Saša Stanišić she also translated Nacht voor het feest and Hoe de soldaat de grammofoon repareert for publisher Ambo| Anthos. 

Manon Uphoff is a widely acclaimed author of novels, story collections, essays and novella’s. Recently she was awarded with the three yearly Charlotte Kölher prize for her prose, in particular for her most recent novel Falling is like flying (Vallen is als vliegen, 2019), which was nominated for both the Libris and Bookspot Literature Prizes and awarded with the Tzum Prize and the Bookspot Students Prize. Her books have been or are being translated in German, English and Spanish. She is co-founder of the writers collective FixDit, which propagates more diversity in literature, the canon and education.

Marieke de Groot is a journalist, editor, literary event planner and bookseller at Pantheon Boekholt in Amsterdam. During the pandemic she launched a series of digital events at Pantheon, ‘Pantheon praat met…’, to highlight books and authors that had no access to bookstores because of lockdown.