The award is organised by the publishing house Matthes & Seitz Berlin in cooperation with the German Environment Agency (UBA) and the Art and Nature Foundation. The competition is under the patronage of UBA President Dirk Messner. The prize is endowed with €10,000 and a six-week writing residency in the premises of the Art and Nature Foundation in the middle of its extensive natural grounds.
The members of this year's jury were journalist and author Petra Ahne, Jean-Marie Dhur, co-owner of the Kreuzberg bookshop Zabriskie, literary and cultural scholar Steffen Richter, French writer and translator Cécile Wajsbrot and writer and literary scholar Florian Werner.
Jury statement
A short-distance run through the World Wide Web leads to a crossing of the Alps, a bird of prey circles above the history of the names of wheat varieties, a human heart resembles yeast dough. Kenah Cusanit's essay Senatore Capelli jumps back and forth between seemingly incompatible topics with intellectual curiosity, linguistic elasticity and verve, attitude and humour, and combines them into an oscillating whole. The author folds motifs into and over one another, finds affinities in the seemingly foreign, zooms into detail and boldly takes a bird's eye view. She links the microstructure of an intestinal wall with the stubble fields of industrial agriculture. A fast-paced, utterly contemporary text that expands the boundaries of what nature writing can be in an astonishing way.
Kenah Cusanit (*1979) is a Berlin-based author who studied ancient oriental philology, ethnology and African studies, but has mainly focussed on the sociology of science, theoretical physics, medicine and botany. She has received several awards for her literary texts, in which she pursues a kind of “archaeology of modern knowledge” (P. Jandl, NZZ), most recently the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo Prize (2021/22). In addition to contributions to journals and anthologies, she has published independently: aus Papier (2014) and Chronographe Chorologien I (2017) with hochroth Berlin and Babel (2019) with Carl Hanser Publishers.
About the German Prize for Nature Writing
The prize, which is awarded annually, honours authors who refer to ‘nature’ in their literary work. The prize builds on the tradition of nature writing, which is particularly prominent in the USA and Great Britain, in which authors deal with the perception of nature, with the practical handling of the natural, with reflections on the relationship between nature and culture and with the history of human appropriation of nature. Both essay-style as well as lyrical and epic writing are considered across genres. The thematisation of ‘nature’ includes the dialectic of external and internal nature as well as the dissolution of the boundaries between culture and nature, as well as the possibilities or problems of protecting natural phenomena and natural events. Nature Writing does not speak of ‘nature as such’, but of nature as perceived, experienced and explored by humans. The physical presence, the concrete activity of exploration and the reflection on the insights gained are usually made tangible in the text.
The prize is awarded jointly by the publishing house Matthes & Seitz Berlin, the German Federal Environment Agency and the Art and Nature Foundation, which also provides the prizewinners with a writing residency at its premises and two scholarships to take part in its annual Nature Writing Workshop.
Contact
German Prize for Nature Writing
MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Luise Braunschweig
Großbeerenstraße 57A | 10965 Berlin
T +49 30 7705 9864 | dpnw [at] matthes-seitz-berlin [dot] de
German Environment Agency
Fotini Mavromati, Art Officer
Wörlitzer Platz 1 | 06844 Dessau-Roßlau
T +49 340 2103 2318 | fotini [dot] mavromati [at] uba [dot] de
Art and Nature Foundation
Annette Kinitz
Karpfsee 12 | 83670 Bad Heilbrunn
T +49 8046 2319 2204 | ak [at] kunst-und-natur [dot] de
www.kunst-und-natur.de
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