Literature Kay Matter and Nora Osagiobare read for the 49th Bachmann Prize
Kay Matter has previously made a name for himself with texts for the theater or with autofictional essays. In the reading competition for the Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt, Matter will read a short story that deals with the tension between hiding and revealing oneself.
Image: Keystone
In her debut novel "Daily Soap", Nora Osagiobare denounces everyday racism, sometimes with bitter humor. She also adopts an exaggerated tone in the text for her reading in Klagenfurt, as she revealed in advance.
Image: Keystone
Kay Matter has previously made a name for himself with texts for the theater or with autofictional essays. In the reading competition for the Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt, Matter will read a short story that deals with the tension between hiding and revealing oneself.
Image: Keystone
In her debut novel "Daily Soap", Nora Osagiobare denounces everyday racism, sometimes with bitter humor. She also adopts an exaggerated tone in the text for her reading in Klagenfurt, as she revealed in advance.
Image: Keystone
The Days of German-Language Literature (-29.06.) are virtually the casting show of the German-language literary scene. A total of 14 texts will be read and discussed - and broadcast live on television. The Swiss entries are by Kay Matter and Nora Osagiobare.
26.06.2025, 10:00
SDA
This televised reading competition, which culminates in the awarding of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, is held in the strictest secrecy. The only thing that is known is who will be competing for the six prizes this year. The order of the readings has been decided by lot: Kay Matter will read on Friday at 14:30, Nora Osagiobare will read on Saturday at 10:00. We can only speculate about the content of the nominated texts.
Only the jury knows all the texts in advance and one or the other will have already thought about what clever things to say to make themselves stand out. Because this TV competition, like many casting shows, is also about the profile neuroses of one or other jury member.
Three of the seven jury members have a Swiss connection: SRF Literature Club presenter Laura de Weck, literary critic Philipp Tingler and literary scholar Thomas Strässle. Both Swiss texts for this year's 49th Days of German-Language Literature will be read at Strässle's invitation.
"Wit, drive and very good dialog"
Matter and Osagiobare also caught his eye thanks to their recently published books "Muskeln aus Plastik" (2024) and "Daily Soap" (2025) respectively, he told the Keystone-SDA news agency. "In both cases, the literary quality and thematic relevance are outstanding, which is why I am delighted to be competing with these texts in Klagenfurt," says Strässle. He selected these two voices from around 150 to 200 submissions. In recent years, Strässle has shown himself to be one of those jury members who is probably most concerned with the texts and least concerned with his own profile.
For him, Nora Osagiobare's text is characterized by "wit, drive and very good dialogue". In her clever debut "Daily Soap", the Zurich-based author packs social criticism into the look and feel of a soap opera with plenty of bitter humor. She has retained this exaggerated tone for her reading in Klagenfurt. This time, however, she uses a reality TV setting to study the milieu. A POC (Person of Color) narrator from Zurich will talk about a father-daughter relationship. It is about racism, friendship and emotional coldness. Osagiobare also reveals to the Keystone-SDA news agency that she loves writing from the perspective of ruthless female characters, "because women in our society are supposed to be nice and kind. And because in the history of literature, bad women are unfortunately written far too rarely by female authors".
Kay Matter herself is formally surprised by her own text. It is actually "a classic short story", says Matter in an interview with Keystone-SDA. Until now, he has liked to push the boundaries of genre, writing for the theater or autofictional essays, as he did most recently in "Muskel aus Plastik". In this essay, Matter sensitively and with a pleasant sense of self-irony searches for a language for an incommunicable pain and for all those situations where excessive demands, ignorance and prejudices in our non-disabled, normative majority society prevent us from speaking.
The text for Klagenfurt also begins in a similarly uncertain situation: "This text not only deals with the tension between hiding and revealing oneself, with signs that are read differently depending on the other person," says Matter. And Strässle reveals that it is an "elegiac text about codes, small gestures and attitudes; about a figure that redefines itself. A very important topic of our time".
A critical look at the television format
Matter and Osagiobare both have a reputation for being among the most interesting new voices in German-language literature at the moment. They are competing for a total of five prizes with very different texts. Both are rather critical of the television format.
For Matter, however, this competition is also a "platform for my topics and my positions. In the end, it's 25 minutes live on ORF and 3Sat". Osagiobare, who herself deconstructs the setting, roles and narrative styles of such formats in her texts, recently told of a nightmare about Klagenfurt at the Solothurn Literature Days. In the dream, her text was massively changed: "In the printed version in the television studio, there were suddenly words that I didn't know how to pronounce. I got so angry that at one point during the reading I pointed my middle finger at the camera. The audience thought it was all funny, only one woman complained about my unprofessional outfit. She herself was wearing a swimsuit."
Evaluation is part of the concept. The fact that the jury can analyze the texts in detail beforehand makes the live discussion seem very bourgeois and elitist to the TV audience. The jury often gets lost in details and technical banter. On the other hand, the jury discussion has become increasingly polemical in recent years: jurors try to praise their own candidates, destroy those of others and attract attention themselves with punchlines. It remains to be seen which of these are actually spontaneous and their own competence. The texts are very topical and relevant. The format, on the other hand, should change if it is to remain relevant.
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation
