Thomas Kunst receives Kleist-Preis 2023

The Kleist-Preis 2023, endowed with 20,000 Euro, is awarded to author and musician Thomas Kunst, born in Stralsund in 1965.

As is traditional for the Kleist-Preis, author Feridun Zaimoglu – the representative nominated by the jury of the Heinrich von Kleist Society – was solely responsible for choosing Kunst as this year’s laureate. His statement reads as follows: »Thomas Kunst is the most language-obsessed German poet of our time with a passionately crazy heart. In his poems and novels, he dares to break with convention and the ever same. In his stubbornness, a reflection of the northern Germany where he grew up, he defies imagined boundaries: he is East German and worldly, brilliant and resistant to the present. He can weave wreaths of sonnets just as well and powerfully as he can illustrate the fabulous insignificance of happiness in poems (as he did in poetry collections like Die Arbeiterin auf dem Eis, 2013, or Kolonien und Manschettenknöpfe, 2017). He never allows himself to be seduced by the compulsion of topicality. As an extremist of the fantastical, he also wages a successful war against ordinary metaphor. His verses shine because he knows reality in its beautiful details. It is no coincidence that he reveres Thomas Brasch and Nicolas Born. Anyone who reads Thomas Kunst will love not wanting to do without his words anymore.«

Thomas Kunst‘s early work, Besorg noch für das Segel die Chaussee. Gedichte und eine Erzählung 1986-1990 (1991), was published by Reclam Leipzig, followed by volumes of poetry and novels with various publishers, such as Die Verteilung des Lächelns bei Gegenwehr (1992, Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung), Was wäre ich am Fenster ohne Wale (2005, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt), Die Arbeiterin auf dem Eis. Gedichte und Briefe (2013) and KUNST Gedichte 1984-2014 (2015, both edition AZUR in Dresden). The author published the avant-garde novel Freie Folge with Jung und Jung in Salzburg in 2015. His most recent publications, the poetry collection Kolonien und Manschettenknöpfe (2017) and his novel Zandschower Klinken (2021), which was also shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2021, were published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Thomas Kunst’s poetic work has been awarded several prizes and scholarships, including the Dresden Poetry Prize in 1996, the Villa Massimo Fellowship in 2003, the F.-C.-Weiskopf-Preis of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2004, the Merano Poetry Prize in 2014 and the Walter Bauer-Preis in 2018; at the same time, it testifies to the staying power that is indispensable for writing.

The award ceremony will take place on November 26, 2023, at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

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