Judith Schalansky wins German literary prize

German writer Judith Schalansky was awarded the presitgious Wilhem Raabe Literature Prize on Sunday in the city of Braunschweig. Schalansky, 38, can add the award and the €30,000 ($34,150) prize money to her already crowded trophy cabinet.

The prize was awarded for Schalansky's latest novel "An Inventory of Certain Losses," a short story collection that explores how we think about the past and things that are no more – including the country of Schalansky's birth, East Germany.

Schalansky "succeeded in doing something really unusual: She finds a lingua franca for dealing with death and loss; a poetic prose of metamorphoses," the jury said.

The Berlin-based writer is also a book designer, and won the award for Germany's most beautiful book for "Atlas of Remote Islands," which includes illustrations of 50 far-flung islands around the world, accompanied by Schalansky's impressionistic description of their natural and human histories.

Her 2011 novel "The Giraffe's Neck" won the German Book Prize, the most renowned award for books originally written in the German language.

The Wilhem Raabe Prize is named for the famed 18th century German writer, who was born near and spent much of his life in Braunschweig.

es/rc (dpa, KNA)

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