Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2025 - Kristine Bilkau: Halbinsel

In the organizer's words:

The newly crowned winner of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize will be a guest at Peterknecht on July 1.

A house on the Wadden Sea. A mother and her daughter. And an attempt to bring the generations closer together.

A peninsula in the North Frisian Wadden Sea. Annett, in her late forties, has lived here on the North Sea for many years, raising her daughter Linn alone after the early death of her husband. Linn, in her mid-twenties, moved out into the world full of energy after graduating from high school, has worked as an environmental volunteer in Swedish and Romanian forests and is involved in a reforestation project. For Annett, her daughter is the embodiment of hope, meaning and the future. But at a conference, during a lecture, Linn collapses, her circulation breaks down and she is exhausted. Annett takes her home for a week, by the sea near Husum. One week turns into two, then three weeks, then months. Torn between the pressure to perform and the search for meaning, Linn seems to be at rock bottom in her mid-twenties. Annett feels helpless in the face of her daughter's listlessness. Over time, conflicts arise between mother and daughter, but also between two generations. One has to learn to understand the reality of the other's life anew.
With a keen sense of interpersonal relationships, Kristine Bilkau explores the pressing issues of our time - the question of the responsibility of older people for the state of the world and the desire of younger people to fill their own lives with meaning.

Kristine Bilkau, born in 1974, is one of the most important voices in contemporary German literature. She studied history and American studies in Hamburg and New Orleans. Her debut novel "Die Glücklichen" (The Lucky Ones) received an enthusiastic media response, was awarded the Franz-Tumler Prize, the Klaus-Michael-Kühne Prize and the Hamburg Prize for Literature and has been translated into several languages. She was shortlisted for the German Book Prize with "Nebenan". Her new novel "Halbinsel" was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair 2025 Prize. Kristine Bilkau lives with her family in Hamburg.

Admission: 17 €

Tickets at the Peterknecht bookshop, all Ticket Shop Thüringen ticket outlets and at www.peterknecht.de

Photo © Thorsten Kirves