Academy member Daniela Danz receives the Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize 2026

Academy member Daniela Danz, President of the Literature and Music Class, is being honoured with this year's Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize for her literary work. The award ceremony will take place on 14 June at the Weimar Music School Schloss Belvedere. Historian Prof. Dr. Karl Schlögel will give the laudatory speech.

"Daniela Danz is one of the most distinctive voices of contemporary German-language literature," the jury said in its award statement. “As a poet, she has an almost somnambulistic command of a wide range of forms, from Alcaic odes and prose poems to her own creative forms, most recently in the poetry collection Portolan (2025). Her novels and essays (Nichts ersetzt den Blick ins Gelände, 2023) tie in with her cosmopolitan poetry in the best sense of the word. She writes about the search for freedom, about the ambivalences of nature and about European crisis areas. In this way, her essays and poems pave the way for a transformed understanding of humanity and the environment, of culture and politics – in the conviction that free literature can measure our times and connect European spaces.”

Daniela Danz was born in Eisenach in 1976 and studied art history and German literature in Tübingen, Prague, Berlin and Halle. She has published poetry collections, novels and essays and has received numerous scholarships and literary awards. She wrote the libretto for Ben Frost's opera Der Mordfall Halit Yozgat (The Halit Yozgat Murder Case) for the Hanover State Opera. She has been teaching at the University of Hildesheim since 2009.

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize has been awarded since 1993 by the CDU-affiliated foundation of the same name. The jury included Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Marx (University of Bamberg) as chair, former Minister of State for Culture Prof. Monika Grütters (Member of the German Bundestag), Dr. Marit Heuß (University of Leipzig), Sandra Kegel (head of the arts section of the FAZ) and Dr. Wolfgang Matz (Munich). The prize is endowed with €20,000. Previous winners include Sarah Kirsch, Herta Müller and Daniel Kehlmann.