Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2023: Daniel Kehlmann to deliver speech honouring Salman Rushdie

The German-Austrian author, screenwriter, essayist, literary critic and lecturer Daniel Kehlmann will deliver the speech honouring Salman Rushdie, recipient of this year’s Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The award ceremony will take place at 11 am on Sunday 22 October 2023 in the framework of the Frankfurter Book Fair. The event will be broadcast live on German television (ZDF) from the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 to director Michael Kehlmann and actress Dagmar Mettler. He grew up in Vienna and studied Philosophy and German at university there. Today, he lives with his family in Berlin and occasionally also in New York. He has been a friend of Salman Rushdie for many years.

Kehlmann has produced an extensive and much discussed body of work comprised of novels, plays and screenplays. His early novels, Beerholms Vorstellung (1997) and Mahlers Zeit (1999), brought him popularity in Germany, and he went on to gain international standing with the novel Me and Kaminski (2003). His next novel, Measuring the World (2005), an entertaining look at the lives of two of Germany’s greatest scientific minds, was translated into over 40 languages and counts among the most successful books in post-war German literature. Kehlmann’s other novels include Fame (2009), F. A Novel (2013) and most recently Tyll (2017), which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

In addition to novels, Kehlmann is known for numerous plays, screenplays, reviews, essays and columns written for diverse media, including Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Literaturen and Volltext.

Among the awards Kehlmann has received for his work are the Candide Preis, the WELT-Literaturpreis, the Per Olov Enquist Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, the Frank Schirrmacher Prize, the Schubart-Literaturpreis and the Anton Wildgans Prize.

Kehlmann has held lectureships in poetics at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, University of Applied Sciences Wiesbaden and Göttingen University as well as at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in 2014. In 2010, he joined Jonathan Franzen and Adam Haslett for the Tübingen Poetics Lectureship. He has also been a guest professor in the German Department at New York University.

Kehlmann is a member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg and the German Academy for Language and Literature. He is a founding member of PEN Berlin.

For more information on the 2023 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, please visit www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/en

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A press photo of Daniel Kehlmann is available for download at www.boersenverein.de/pressefotos.