The Büchner Prize winner Elke Erb is dead. The poet died on Monday evening in Berlin at the age of 85, as a spokeswoman for the Suhrkamp publishing house said on Tuesday, citing Erb’s environment.
The writer was born in Scherbach in the Eifel in 1938. She was part of the GDR’s literary subculture. Most recently she lived in Berlin.
Her work includes poetry, short prose and translations. Her first books were “Expert Reports, Poetry and Prose” (1975) and “The Thread of Patience” (1978), and selected texts also appeared in the West.
In 2020, Erb was honored with the Georg Büchner Prize, which is considered the most important literary award in Germany. “For the undaunted enlightener, poetry is a political and highly vital form of knowledge,” said the German Academy for Language and Poetry about Erb at the time.
On Tuesday, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier praised Erb as a special voice in recent German literature. Her writing is opinionated in every respect. It fascinated many readers and made them wiser, wrote Steinmeier in a condolence to her son, the musician and author Konrad Endler.
Broadcast: rbb24 Abendschau, January 23, 2024, 7:30 p.m
2024-01-24 08:41:30
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