The award will be presented by the publisher Matthes & Seitz Berlin in cooperation with the German Environment Agency and the Art and Nature Foundation. The competition is under the patronage of the President of the German Environment Agency, Dirk Messner. The prize includes an award of €10,000 and a six-week writing residency at the Art and Nature Foundation’s campus, whose ample grounds are situated in the Bavarian foothills.
This year’s jury is comprised of journalist and author Petra Ahne, the co-owner of the Zabriskie bookshop in Kreuzberg, Jean-Marie Dhur, the literary and cultural scholar, Steffen Richter, the image and media scholar, Birgit Schneider and the writer and literary scholar, Florian Werner.
Franziska Füchsl’s borderland prose depicts the fascinating natural landscape along the Große Mühl river and its branches and does not shy away from acknowledging the area’s cultural legacies – and devastations. The Mühlviertel region of Upper Austria, which borders Bavaria and South Bohemia and is the author’s place of origin, becomes, in this narrative, the subject of a kind of local lore or homeland study that considers not only the geological features of the gneiss and granite highlands with their feldspar, quartz, and mica, but also the regions’ local dialects and borderland histories. The work’s language creates strikingly concrete and unique environments, weaving natural and social history through shifting perspectives — from people to wild orchids to trees. It is this highly crafted language that employs registers of both spoken and written forms, that carries the readers along. The flow of water affects the flow of the narrative, which draws its coherence from metonymic proliferations and sound-based associations. These elements, in turn, juxtapose the uniformity of the flow with a ruggedness of imagery, syntax, and vocabulary. In Franziska Füchsl’s "Am Rande der Müh", words not only depict what exists but also create a reality of their own. The river becomes a vessel for reflecting on the relationship between humans and nature.
Franziska Füchsl, born in 1991 in Putzleinsdorf, lives between Vienna and Kiel. She worked as an assistant in metal processing, then studied German Philology and English Studies at the University of Vienna, as well as Language and Design at the Muthesius Art Academy Kiel. From 2018 to 2020, Füchsl was part of Forum Text of the Drama Forum at uniT Graz. Additionally, Füchsl translates and is a member of the Versatorium – Association for Poetry and Translation. She is currently helping to set up the ‘Jahoda’ Print Room at Versatorium — a space centred around a lead-type Korrex Stuttgart press, designed to extend and decelerate the act of translation by integrating it into a typesetting process. In terms of typography and book design, Füchsl — alone or in collaboration — explores producing provisional reading formats in extremely limited runs. In 2024, she received the Literature Promotion Prize of the City of Vienna.
About the German Prize for Nature Writing
The prize, which is awarded annually, honours authors who refer to ‘nature’ in their literary work. The prize builds on the tradition of nature writing—particularly prominent in the United States and Great Britain—which explores the perception of nature, the practical engagement with the natural world, reflections on the relationship between nature and culture, and the history of human appropriation of nature. Both essay-style as well as lyrical and epic writing are considered across genres. The engagement with ‘nature’ encompasses the dialectic between external and internal nature, the dissolution of boundaries between culture and nature, and the potentialities and challenges of preserving natural phenomena and events. Nature writing does not address ‘nature as such’, but rather nature as it is perceived, experienced, and explored by humans. The physical presence of the observer, the concrete act of exploration, and the subsequent reflection on the insights gained are typically rendered tangible within the text.
The prize is jointly awarded by the publishing house Matthes & Seitz Berlin, the German Environment Agency, and the Art and Nature Foundation, which also offers the laureates a writing residency at its premises as well as two scholarships to participate in its annual Nature Writing Workshop.
Contact
German Prize for Nature Writing
MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Luise Braunschweig
Großbeerenstraße 57A | 10965 Berlin
T +49 30 7705 9864 | dpnw [at] matthes-seitz-berlin [dot] de
German Environment Agency
Fotini Mavromati, Art Officer
Wörlitzer Platz 1 | 06844 Dessau-Roßlau
T +49 340 2103 2318 | fotini [dot] mavromati [at] uba [dot] de
Art and Nature Foundation
Annette Kinitz
Karpfsee 12 | 83670 Bad Heilbrunn
T +49 8046 2319 2204 | ak [at] kunst-und-natur [dot] de
www.kunst-und-natur.de
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