German Book Prize 2010

The 2010 German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis) went to the Swiss author Melinda Nadj Abonji for her novel Tauben Fliegen Auf (Falcons without Falconers). The book is about a Serbian-Hungarian family which emigrates to Switzerland in the 70s. They open a café and try to assimilate into Swiss society, but they remain a group stuck between cultures. The central questions in the book revolve around the tension between the language of the homeland and that of the adopted country.

More information here (in German)

ETA: official English title

And now, it is in English :D

Integration novel wins

German literature has a background of migration. Thanks to writer Melinda Nadj Abonji, dedication, obstinacy and poetic power mix in with it. She got the Deutsche Buchpreis for her novel Doves Fly Up (not official translation).

By Daniel Haas

5th October 2010

In the end integration becomes very striking: the director of the German union of fares and the writer, from ex-Yugoslavia, are standing on the stage and are reading together their speeches. When voices of different origins mix, this image conveys that, sometimes something firm results from it, a dialogue conducted across oundaries.

The writer is Melinda Nadj Abonji, 42, her book Doves Fly Up is about a Serbian-Hungarian family which emigrates to Switzerland in the seventies. They open a café, they adapt and integrate themselves but they still remain a community between cultures.

The first person narrator, the daughter of the Kocsis, will develop that double look of home and abroad on relationships into complex, enlightening perspectives. It will mainly be the language – the tension between original idioms and those of the guest country -, on which the central questions about identity and fatherland, being foreign and assimilation, will cristalise.

A greeting to the audience in Hungarian

The idea for her novel had come to her, a German Swiss, in the French part of the country. There, where voices sounded differently and more loudly, they brought back memories: of a lost home which can revive in poetic incantation. And it is connected to a political mandate: immigration not only as literary subject, but also to be understood as a reminder of disputability. She was ashamed to explain to foreign friends the plaques of the Schweizerische Volkspartei hostile to foreigners. So, Switzerland was such a country then?

About the theme

Tension between one’s own and the strange should not be erased in literature, it orders us to bear differences. Thus it was a nice punch line that Abonjis leaving greeting to the audience in Frankfurt was not in German, but in Hungarian. She can be multilingual and without boundaries, just like that fantastic German literature.

Nice translation :nod:

There are some English articles on it now and they are calling the book "Falcons without Falconers", so I guess that will be the English title. I edited the OP accordingly.