Martina Hefter wins German Book Prize, kicking off Frankfurt Book Fair

Martina Hefter has won this year’s German Book Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in German-language literature, for her novel “Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?”(“Hey, good morning, how are you?”).

The announcement comes as the Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off this week, the biggest trade fair for books in the world.

“Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?” tells the story of a middle-aged woman who escapes the difficulties of caring for her chronically ill husband by entering the strange world of online love scamming as a willing mark.

Hefter already won the Grand Prize of the German Literature Fund and Literature Prize of the State Capital Wiesbaden this year for the novel. It is her fourth novel, coming 16 years after her last prose work “Die Küsten der Berge” (“The Coasts of the Mountain”) in 2008. In the interim, Heft has published multiple poetry anthologies.

“Navigating between melancholy and euphoria, and reflecting on trust and deception, the novel combines gruelling everyday life with mythological figures and cosmic dimensions in a fascinating way,” the German Book Prize jury said of the novel.

“Martina Hefter writes about all this in her intelligently choreographed novel, which exerts an attraction of its very own.”

As the winner of the German Book Prize, Hefter is awarded €25,000 while the five shortlisted authors – Maren Kames, Clemens Meyer, Ronya Othmann, Markus Thielemann, and Iris Wolff – each receive €2,500.

The biggest and oldest book fair

The announcement of Germany’s biggest book prize coincides with the opening of the world’s biggest book fair in Frankfurt. Running from 16-20 October, the first three days of the fair are dedicated to industry professionals with the general public admitted on the weekend.

Last year’s event drew in over 200,000 visitors from 130 countries. Of the 215,000 visitors, over 110,00 were from the general public. Salman Rushdie was awarded the Peace Prize during the 2023 event.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest fair and also one of the oldest. Its history dates back over 500 years, before the advent of printed books. At first, there was a small fair for selling handwritten books, with the more formal fair established after Johannes Gutenberg pioneered the printing press in the 15th century.

Re-established after World War II in 1949, the Frankfurt Book Fair is celebrating its 76th edition in its current iteration.

This year’s motto for the fair is ‘FBM24 is Read!ng – Read. Reflect. Relate’ and the national guest of honour is Italy, the first time the country has been in the position since 1988.

As part of their guest of honour status, the Italian committee has selected physicist and author Carlo Rovelli, writer Susanna Tamaro and philosopher Stefano Zecchi as literary keynote speakers.

With over 90 authors heading to the fair, some of the programme highlights this year include a discussion between “Sapiens” author Yuval Noah Harari and philosopher Kohei Saito on the topic “Is a system reboot the only way to have a future worth living?”.

Other authors in attendance include Roberto Saviano, Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, Eva Menasse and Omri Boehm.

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2023’s controversy

Last year’s fair was mired in controversy when the LitProm LiBeraturpreis award ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli was abruptly cancelled. Shibli’s novel “Minor Detail”, first published in 2020, detailed the true story of a 1949 rape and murder of a young Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers.

The cancellation of the ceremony by LitProm was criticised by many authors, with over 1,000 signing an open letter against the decision, including Nobel Prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk.

LitProm has since released a statement saying they “formally apologise to Adania Shibli” and that with the escalating war between Israel and Hamas at the time, they “thought it right to hold the award ceremony at a different time in a less politically charged atmosphere — also to avoid possible disturbances or even attacks on Adania Shibli’s person.”

In response to the criticism, LitProm has decided to suspend the award for this year’s edition of the fair.

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