Karin Peschka is this year’s winner of the renowned Veza Canetti Prize of the City of Vienna. The author was nominated by an independent jury of experts.
The jury’s statement
“Karin Peschka is an author who is both form-conscious and narrative-loving, whose writing borrows from a variety of things – from New Objectivity to the aesthetic uncompromisingness of Arthur Rimbaud. In her mid-forties, Peschka entered the literary public in 2014 with Watschenmann, which she quickly followed up with three more novels, a volume of short stories and a play. The late debut makes the urgency of the recurring constellations of her narrative cosmos all the more clear. Peschka’s interest lies in people in exceptional situations, survival in destruction, the long reverberations of wars, the internal and external landscapes of rubble, the moment in which a before passes and an after begins. With a keen sense of gaps of all kinds, the author translates questions of guilt into stories that are told on, but not finished, and finds a harmonious language for a specific post-war speechlessness, which paradoxically does not exclude constant talking, with clever violations of norms in syntax and word order.“
“Karin Peschka’s works – including novels, short prose, haikus, long poems and most recently a play – are powerful offers to readers to deal with the fragility of human life and finiteness, to confront history and memory. Peschka develops an impressive language for this: the author finds borrowings from the Austrian dialect, shows the courage to reduce or even leave a gap or, for example, consistently replaces the narrative I with the infinitive.“so Vienna’s City Councilor for Culture Veronica Kaup-Hasler. „Karin Peschka enriches literary life in an extraordinary way. I am pleased to be able to present her with this year’s Veza Canetti Prize, one of the highest literary awards given by the city of Vienna, and I warmly congratulate her.”
About the author
Karin Peschka, born in 1967, grew up in Eferding, Upper Austria, as the daughter of an innkeeper. She has lived in Vienna since 2000. Peschka attended the Linz Social Academy and worked, among other things, with alcoholic people and unemployed young people and for several years in online editing and project organization. She published in various anthologies and wrote columns for oe1.ORF.at. So far, six books by Karin Peschka have been published by Otto Müller Verlag: “Watschenmann” (2014), “FanniPold” (2016), “Autolyse Wien” (2017), “Putzt euch, tanzen, Lach” (2020), “Dschomba” (2023) and “Bruckner’s Monkey” (2024). The debut novel “Watschenmann” was adapted for the stage in 2019 and performed at the Vienna Volkstheater. In July 2024, the author’s first stage play, “Bruckner’s Monkey”, was published as a bibliophile edition with an essay. Karin Peschka has already received a number of awards, including the Wartholz Literature Prize 2013, the Floriana Literature Prize 2014, the ALPHA Literature Prize 2015, the Ingeborg Bachmann Audience Prize 2017, the renowned Robert Musil Scholarship 2020-2023, the Upper Austria State Culture Prize for Literature 2023 and currently the Veza Canetti Prize 2024. Her books have been nominated several times for the Austrian Book Prize and the HOTLIST. You can also be found regularly on the ORF best list.
For the award
The Veza Canetti Prize, established in 2014, honors and supports the diverse literary work of Austrian women writers. Named after the Viennese writer Veza Canetti (1897–1963), the award commemorates the large number of Austrian women writers who were systematically excluded from the formation of literary canons for centuries. The prize money is set at 10,000 euros, just as high as the City of Vienna’s awards. Previous winners include Anna Kim (2023), Lisa Spalt (2022) and Olga Flor (2014).
Additional information
https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Veza-Canetti-Preis_der_Stadt_Wienhttps://www.wien.gv.at/kultur/abteilung/foerderungen/foerderempfehlungen-literatur.html#veza