The Japanese-Austrian author Milena Michiko Flašar will receive the 2025 Literature Prize of the A and A Cultural Foundation for her prose work. Her best known novels are I Called Him a Tie (2011), Mr. Katō Plays Family (2018), and Above Earth, Below Sky (2023), in which she explores themes such as loneliness, loss of meaning, and death in contemporary Japan with unemotionalism, understatedness, and subtle humor. Flašar's novels offer a German-speaking audience subtle insights into Japanese society and the problems it shares with Western societies.
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The €15,000 Literature Prize will be awarded to Milena Michiko Flašar on May 26, 2025, at 8:00 p.m. in the Red Salon of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. With this award ceremony, the A and A Cultural Foundation also celebrates its 15th anniversary.
The laudatory speech will be given by Swiss literary critic and author Stefan Gmünder, who works as a literary editor for the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard and the literary magazine Volltext. Gmünder was a member of the jury for the Klagenfurt Ingeborg Bachmann Prize from 2015 to 2019 and received the Austrian State Prize for Literary Criticism in 2021.
Actress Sophie Rois, a member of the Volksbühne ensemble, will read from texts by the author.
The event will be accompanied musically by Berlin-based koto player Ritsuko Takeyama.
Milena Michiko Flašar, born on March 31, 1980, in St. Pölten, studied German and Romance languages and literature in Vienna and Berlin. She is the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Austrian father with Czech roots and lives as an author in Vienna. Her latest novel, "Above Earth, Below Heaven," has received numerous awards. Her short story collection, "The Hare in the Moon," will be published in August of this year.
(IN GERMAN)
Additional information
Dates
May 2025
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