Bachmann Prize Celebrates 50 Years, Lena Schätte Wins with "What We Wear"

The 50th Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, a prominent German-language literary competition held in Klagenfurt, Austria, has concluded with Lena Schätte taking home the top honor for her text "Was wir tragen" (What We Wear).

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The worst thing in the literary business is the Bachmann Prize.

This year's competition, celebrating the 100th birthday of the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, saw an increased prize sum of 30,000 Euros. Schätte, born in Lüdenscheid in 1993, previously published a novel titled "Das Schwarz an den Händen meines Vaters" (The Black on My Father's Hands) in 2025. Her background as a psychiatric nurse is noted as potentially influencing her writing.

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This is a scandal, how she writes. Who cares what the woman thinks, what she feels, while she is menstruating? That is not literature – that is a crime.

"Was wir tragen" is described as the story of two overweight young friends, told with "tender fury," exploring themes of sensuality and brutality. Juror Thomas Strässle highlighted the "ambivalence of victimhood" in Schätte's work. The text uses the experience of being overweight not merely as a physical or psychosomatic symptom, but as a metaphor for self-empowerment. The narrative depicts the protagonist growing beyond her abusive mother, thereby escaping physical violence.

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The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize has now taken place fifty times. The jurors no longer appear in judge's robes today, and the qualitative crime rate among the texts has significantly decreased.

Unlike in past decades, when the competition was sometimes criticized for excessive focus on "topical politics" and dramatic jury debates, this year's event is characterized as having moved away from such engagement contests. The jury noted a significant decrease in the "quality crime rate" among the texts, with no entries deemed truly poor. The competition is now seen as a space where literature finds a setting connected to social realities while allowing for free aesthetic play, free from the "burden of heavy topics."

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The weight is not just a physical or psychosomatic symptom for Schätte, but also a metaphor for self-empowerment.