International Prize for Literature 2025: Award Ceremony
7.7.2025
Award ceremony, sound intervention, talk
27 July 2025
19:00
Weltwirtschaft
In German
Free entry
The winners of this year's Internationaler Literaturpreis will be announced at a festive award ceremony. After an opening speech by the director and chief curator of HKW, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the award-winning author Geetanjali Shree is holding a keynote. Members of this year's jury Deniz Utlu and Cia Rinne will then announce the winners and give a laudatory speech, which will be followed by a discussion with the author and translator and the jury members Hannes Langendörfer and Khuê Phạm about the award-winning work and its translation.
The Internationaler Literaturpreis is awarded by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the foundation Elementarteilchen (Hamburg).
The Shortlist 2025
Sankofa
Doğan Akhanlı | Translated from Turkish by Recai Hallaç
Sujet Verlag, 2024
Übung in Gehorsam
Sarah Bernstein | Translated from English by Beatrice Faßbender
Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2025
Autobiographie des Todes
Kim Hyesoon | Translate from Korean by Sool Park und Uljana Wolf
S. Fischer Verlag, 2025
Ich ertrinke in einem fliehenden See
Anna Melikova | Translated from Russian by Christiane Pöhlmann
Matthes & Seitz, 2024
Trauriger Tiger
Neige Sinno | Translated from French by Michaela Meßner
dtv Verlag, 2024
So gehn wir denn hinab
Jesmyn Ward | Translated from English by Ulrike Becker
Antje Kunstmann Verlag, 2024
More information about the shortlist on hkw.de/literaturpreis.
The Prize
The International Prize for Literature is awarded for the seventeenth time in 2025. It honours an outstanding work of contemporary international literature and its first translation into German. This dual focus makes it unique in the German award landscape.
The International Prize for Literature concentrates on heterogeneous forms of contemporary narration and focuses on the relationships between texts and realities as well as the dialogue between different cultures and languages. By focusing on translations, it aims to overcome national canonizations and limited understandings of the literary and thus takes into account the current conditions of literary creation in a world shaped by diverse cultural interdependencies.
The list of previous prizewinners is a testament to the richness of contemporary literature worldwide and to the productivity of literary translation in German-speaking countries.
Since 2023, German first translations of international poetry can also be submitted. The International Literature Prize is endowed with 35,000 euros (20,000 euros for the author, 15,000 euros for the translator).
The jury selected six books from the 118 submissions for this year's shortlist.
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