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Shida Bazyar wins German Book Prize with Die Lücken

The German writer receives the prize for a novel about suppressed history and its consequences in the present.

Shida Bazyar won the 2026 German Book Prize on Monday evening with her novel Die Lücken. The prize was presented in Frankfurt to the writer of a book that connects the history of a fictional village in the Hunsrück with Germany’s Nazi past.

The jury chose Die Lücken from six novels on the shortlist. The prize is regarded as one of the most important distinctions for German-language literature and is awarded annually to the novel of the year. The announcement was made in the Kaisersaal of the Frankfurter Römer.

In Die Lücken, Bazyar uses the fictional village of Heimesbach as a place where almost a century of German history comes together. According to the description by the publisher and the jury, the story moves between different periods and family histories. As a result, it is not only about events from the Nazi era, but also about the way a community later recounts, conceals or distorts its past.

The novel deals, among other things, with Jewish families who lose everything, people who downplay their own role after the war, and later generations with roots in Iran. The jury describes the book as an investigation into the question of what a sense of home is built on. The text does not turn the village into a direct historical portrait, but into a literary construction in which personal and collective memory intersect.

Bazyar was born in Tehran in 1988 and grew up in Germany. Her earlier work likewise dealt with migration, racism and the question of how personal experiences find their way into public narratives. Die Lücken was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in September 2026 and had earlier been included on the prize’s shortlist.

Alongside Bazyar, the finalists were Franziska Gänsler with Orca, Valeria Gordeev with Die Zikade entschlüpft ihrer goldglänzenden Hülle, Elias Hirschl with Schleifen, Peggy Mädler with Selbstregulierung des Herzens and Dana Vowinckel with Anton und Alma. The jury had selected the six titles from a longer list of German-language novels published during the current year.

The distinction is primarily a literary recognition and not a judgement on historical facts in the novel. Die Lücken is fiction, even though Bazyar uses recognisable social and historical backgrounds. For Dutch readers, the prize is relevant because the book shows which themes are currently central to German-language literature: memory culture, migration and the tension between local identity and suppressed history.

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