Fiston Mwanza Mujila is the Rosegger Literary Prize 2018 winner for his novel Tram 83. The Austria based prize, worth 10,000 Euros, was awarded on March 31, 2018.
The Peter Rosegger Literature Prize has been awarded since 1951 by the Province of Styria in memory of Peter Rosegger. Styria is one of the provinces of the Republic of Austria and Rosegger was a writer and poet from the European nation. The prize has been awarded in two periods from 1951 to 1971 followed by 1985 to date. Since 2001, the Peter Rosegger Literature Prize is awarded every three years with the winner going home with the € 10,000 prize money.
The 2018 winner was announced on March 31 by a panel of judges that included Alfred Kolleritsch, Angelika Klammer, Christoph Harter, Annette Knoch, Markus Jaroschka, Klaus Kastberger and Werner Krause. The winner is DR Congo born Austrian resident Fiston Mwanza Mujila for his debut novel Tram 83. The jury praised him as a “virtuoso narrator on his way to the world of excellent contemporary literature”.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila was born in 1981 in Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lives in Graz. Tram 83 is his first novel, for which he has already won several awards. It was the winner of the Etisalat Prize for African Literature 2015 (the prize has since rebranded to 9Mobile Prize). It won the German International Literature Prize 2017. It also made the Man Booker International Prize 2016 longlist.
The award ceremony will take place on November 29, 2018 at a ceremony in the Kunsthaus Graz .
Leave a Reply