English PEN announced that Yrsa Daley-Ward is the winner of the £3,000 (about $3,750) PEN Ackerley Prize, dedicated to memoir and autobiography, for The Terrible, which was praised by chair of judges Peter Parker for its "sheer originality, energy and fearlessness," the Bookseller reported.
In an acceptance speech read by Penguin Press editorial director Josephine Greywoode, Daley-Ward said: "I never expected to write a memoir. I still feel strange telling anyone that I have written a memoir. Two years ago I sat down to write what I thought would be a fantasy book about children and magic, but what followed was a different kind of thing altogether, because everything was true. Sometimes when you have a lot of what feels like heavy truth inside you, it has to move out of the way to make space for other things. And so, here we are. The truest thing I have written so far. I never thought I'd tell another living soul some of the things that are in this book."
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Swiss writer Lukas Bärfuss has won the €50,000 (about $56,225) 2019 Georg Büchner Prize of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Börsenblatt reported. The jury called Bärfuss "a distinguished writer and playwright of contemporary German literature."
His works have included the novella Die Toten Männer and the novels Hundert Tage, Koala (winner of the 2014 Swiss Book Prize), and Hagard.