Shida Bazyar wins Book Prize Award for Die Lücken

Oct 5

Daubner announces that Shida Bazyar has won the German Book Prize for Die Lücken, following the jury's evening announcement in Frankfurt. She describes its suppressed history of persecution in a western German small town and relays the jury's praise for portraying almost a century of ambivalent German life through individual fates.

At the October 5, 2026 ceremony in the Kaisersaal of Frankfurt's Römer, Sebastian Guggolz announces Shida Bazyar's Die Lücken as the German Book Prize winner. The complete original jury citation praises its reflection on almost a century of German life, Jewish persecution and belonging for people with migration histories, using a dead narrator, changing periods and interwoven fictional and documentary elements. Tagesthemen's complete bulletin relays the Frankfurt decision and individual-fates rationale. Tagesschau's complete report adds Bazyar's ambivalence about celebrating a novel about persecution and murder, Cornelia Geißler's praise of the perspectives and language, and €25,000 prize money. Its bestseller forecast remains prospective. The novel's fictional and historical content stays literary context; Bazyar's subsequent anti-exclusion appeal is separately scoped.