The same book, a different process, another prize: on 29 October, Shida Bazyar received the Bavarian Book Prize for “Die Lücken” (The Gaps) at the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche in the Munich Residenz. On 5 October, she had already been awarded the German Book Prize. Such agreement seems to offer validation beyond any single jury’s deliberations. But what exactly does it validate?
First, it confirms that panels with different members have singled out the same novel. It does not yet establish that they chose it for the same reasons or represent the literary public as a whole. Bazyar’s awards allow us to distinguish between a consensus on quality and the attention that a repeated judgement can generate.
Two routes to the same book
For the German Book Prize, selection begins with the publishers: each may submit up to two novels, and the jury can request others. In 2026, seven members considered a total of 205 titles, drawing up a longlist of 20 and a shortlist of six books. Alongside critics and academics, the bookselling trade was directly represented by Theresa Donner of the Halle bookshop heiter bis wolkig. The selection stages and the final statement explaining the decision are made public, but not the full debate over the result.
In Munich, by contrast, the decision itself is part of the public format. Maja Beckers, Andreas Platthaus and Marie Schoeß discussed the books before an audience; three books and thirty minutes are allotted to each of the two categories. This allows the arguments to be heard, but here, too, the preliminary selection remains decisive: only nominees can reach this stage.
One point matters for the chronology: the Bavarian nominations had already been finalised on 3 September, before Bazyar’s win in Frankfurt. Her selection there therefore cannot be explained as a response to the German Book Prize. Whether that result influenced the later deliberations is neither proved nor disproved by this. The published jury lists do, in any case, show that the decisions were made by two panels with no members in common.
A shared criterion, different emphases
The Frankfurt jury’s statement connects social questions with narrative technique. It highlights shifts in time, changing degrees of proximity and distance, and the interweaving of fictional and historical figures. It sees these as the source of the novel’s power to counter indifference. In this argument, political significance does not sit alongside form, but emerges through it.
The final Munich statement likewise stresses how individual life stories combine to form a portrait of society. Its particular emphasis, however, is on uncertainty towards the characters: the sense of estrangement experienced while reading, it argues, corresponds to the experience of those who are denied a sense of belonging.
The common ground is therefore more specific than mere approval of an important subject. Both juries recognise a literary construction intended to make exclusion palpable. Their statements offer related, but not identical, readings of how it does so. They explain the shared result; they offer only limited insight into the alternatives that were eliminated.
What happens in the bookshop
Literary recognition and demand are nevertheless not the same thing. Following the German Book Prize, Johanna Thiel of Buchladen Hexenturm in Treysa told the HNA of considerable interest and a reprint that had yet to arrive. This is a specific local observation, not a sales report for the market as a whole.
Nor do bookshops simply follow the prizes when making their selections. Margret Holota explained to the Westfälischer Anzeiger that Bazyar’s reading at her bookshop in Hamm had long been planned and was almost sold out even before the award. The bookshop Zeitlos, meanwhile, bases its published recommendation on the novel’s mosaic-like structure: readers have to make the connections between the life stories themselves.
There is an important distinction here. A prize can concentrate demand; a bookshop can explain whom a book might interest. Repeated awards provide further occasions to notice the same title. Immediately after the Munich prize, it remains unclear how much additional demand it will generate. Consensus emerges here from a succession of reasoned judgements — it remains persuasive as long as their repetition does not replace the arguments.
Original reviewed by the editors · 30 October 2026
