In 2012, the new Berlin airport Berlin-Brandenburg will be opened in Schönefeld. The city is looking for new uses for the old airports Tempelhof and Tegel. ...
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The German Book Prize is presented to the best German-language novel just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair as an annual award from the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels Stifung – the Foundation of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association. The Prize is intended to draw attention beyond national borders to authors writing in German, to reading and to the keynote medium of the book.
The prize was awarded on 12 October to Katrin Schmidt for her novel "You're Not Going to Die".
The 2009 shortlist: 
Rainer Merkel: "Light Years Away" (Lichtjahre Entfernt)
S. Fischer Verlag
About the book
English excerpt
Herta Müller: "Everything I Own I Carry With Me" (Atemschaukel)
Hanser Verlag
About the book
English excerpt
Norbert Scheuer: "The Rushing of the Weir" (Überm Rauschen)
C.H.Beck Verlag
About the book
English excerpt
Katrin Schmidt: You're Not Going to Die (Du Stirbst Nicht)
Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag
About the book
English excerpt 
Clemens J. Setz: "Frequencies" (Die Frequenzen)
Residenz Verlag
About the book
English excerpt
Stephan Thome : "Border Walk" (Grenzgang)
Suhrkamp Verlag
About the book
English excerpt
The judges for the German Book Prize 2009 are: Richard Kämmerlings, Michael Lemling, Martin Lüdke, Lothar Müller, Iris Radisch, Daniela Strigl and Hubert Winkels
RSS
Former East-German novelist Christa Wolf has spent a lifetime writing against forgetting and the repression of guilt. But the will to remember, it seems, has not been enough to prevent her from doing exactly that. Her biographer Jörg Magenau reviews her new autobiographical novel "Stadt der Engel", which ends in Death Valley. Perhaps 'dead end' would have been more to the point. Photo:©Susanne Schleyer
The Austrian writer Josef Haslinger talks about his sexual encounters with paedophile priests as a boy in a Catholic boarding school. Instead of joining the chorus of moral outrage, he acknowledges the full spectrum of feelings that these episodes provoked, and argues that simple criminalisation is not the way forward.
Since its publication in January, Helene Hegemann's novel "Axolotl Roadkill" has been at the centre of a debate whose vagaries of terminology have allowed the seriousness of the case to be downplayed. Philipp Theisohn wishes the literary establishment would drop all its talk of intertextuality in favour of a more democratic category: plagiarism.
The new novel by Nobel laureate Herta Müller tells of a harrowing experience which will leave an indelible stamp on its survivor for the rest of his life. Her book stems from interviews with the poet Oskar Pastior and other Gulag survivors. An excerpt in English.
Günter Grass has just published his diary from 1990, recording the tumultous events after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "From Germany to Germany" is a list of ominous predictions for the future of German unity. The former GDR writer Monika Maron looks at how blinded Grass was by his own preconceptions.
This year Turkey was the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We introduce the books that attracted the most critical attention.
and all the best for 2009!
This year's prestigious Büchner Prize went to Austrian writer Josef Winkler. He talks to Paul Jandl about dung heaps, patriarchs, the fear of speechlessness and the elegance of John Paul II's coffin. Photo © Jerry Bauer / SV