Bavaria: Dutch poet Herzberg awarded

Munich (dpa / lby) - The Dutch poet Judith Herzberg will receive the Horst Bienek Prize for poetry this year.

Bavaria: Dutch poet Herzberg awarded

Munich (dpa / lby) - The Dutch poet Judith Herzberg will receive the Horst Bienek Prize for poetry this year. The award was last given every two years and is endowed with 10,000 euros. The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts announced on Monday that the prize would be awarded on December 13 in the Munich Residenz.

The international prize is financed from the estate of the Munich poet Horst Bienek (1930-1990). The artist bequeathed his estate to the Academy with the condition that a foundation be set up.

Herzberg's poetry is "exciting, playful, twisted, characterized by a desire to contradict, by seriousness, sometimes as serious as death, only without pathos or clumsiness," the Academy justified the honor. "Again and again she plays with our expectations. She dares to do something - for example, to locate grief close to irony," it said about the work of the 88-year-old author.

The Horst Bienek Promotional Prize, worth 5,000 euros, goes to Munich-born writer Ronya Othmann. The 29-year-old is said to be an all-rounder. "As a columnist and novelist, she deals with expulsion, flight and homesickness, with repression and massacres of minorities, with a wealth of knowledge and material."