Lena Schätte wins 50th Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with story of schoolgirl outsiders
At the 50th Days of German-language Literature in Klagenfurt, Lena Schätte took the €30,000 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her text 'Was wir tragen', a portrait of two overweight girls navigating social exclusion.
The winning text
Lena Schätte, a 32-year-old author from North Rhine-Westphalia, won the 50th Ingeborg Bachmann Prize on Sunday with her story 'Was wir tragen' (What We Carry). The text follows two overweight Hauptschule students and their friendship as they battle social marginalisation. Schätte beat 13 other competitors in the annual competitive reading.
The text has an existential force.
Juror Thomas Strässle praised Schätte for handling the theme of exclusion without accusation or didacticism. The author herself called the win "a fever dream" in her first reaction.
Prize money and audience vote
The city of Klagenfurt endowed the main prize with 30,000 euros. Schätte also collected the BKS audience prize, worth an additional 10,000 euros, chosen by online vote.
Other awards
The 15,000-euro Kelag Prize went to Hungarian poet and performance artist Kinga Tóth for 'OstblockMädl', a musically shaped text exploring labour migration, identity and language in the Austro-Hungarian border region. Austrian-born Magdalena Schrefel received the 3sat Prize (7,500 euros) for a story about a 40-year-old woman receiving a breast cancer diagnosis.
- Bachmann Prize
- 30000 EUR
- Kelag Prize
- 15000 EUR
- Audience Prize
- 10000 EUR
- 3sat Prize
- 7500 EUR
A golden jubilee and a centenary
The Days of German-language Literature have run since 1977. Previous Bachmann Prize winners include Sten Nadolny, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Uwe Tellkamp and Helga Schubert. Last year Natascha Gangl won with the poetic text 'DA STA'. The 2026 edition also fell just days after what would have been Ingeborg Bachmann’s 100th birthday, on 25 June.
Schätte’s background
Born in Lüdenscheid in 1993, Schätte now lives in Altena. She worked as a psychiatric nurse before beginning studies at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig in 2020. Her novel 'Das Schwarz an den Händen meines Vaters' made the longlist of the German Book Prize last year.
