Berlin, October 6th, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) – Shida Bazyar has won this year’s German Book Prize for her novel “Die Lücken” (“The Gaps”). Sebastian Guggolz, head of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, announced the winner on Monday evening at the Römer in Frankfurt.
The book is set in Heimesbach, a fictional village in the German Hunsrück region that is modeled on the author’s hometown. It deals with the village’s Nazi history and the collective silence that followed. The narrator is dead after a traffic accident. Having learned about the village’s past since then, she is sent back by “gods” to the place she came to at the age of ten, together with her parents and older sister, as a refugee family.
According to the jury, the novel uses individual fates to reflect almost one hundred years of ambivalent German life. It called the author’s literary strategies convincing and described the book as a “novel against indifference”. The roughly 500-page work tells of Jewish families, Nazi profiteers, and Kurdish and Iranian people seeking protection in Germany. It addresses lies, racism and repression, which the novel shows in a village where nobody admits to still keeping a picture of the Führer in a drawer, as German-language publications reported.
Closeness and Distance
The language shifts across the different time levels, giving each its own tone. The jury had already said when announcing the shortlist that the novel tests the limits of the traditional “homeland novel” and redefines the genre with its transnational perspective. In its reasoning for the award, it also praised the perspective of a dead narrator and the kaleidoscopic structure, which allow the text to jump between eras and create closeness as well as distance. The close link between fictional and documentary elements, with invented and historical figures who are given a voice, lends the book its strong resonance, the jurors said.
Bazyar was born in 1988 in Rhineland-Palatinate. Her parents immigrated from Iran. She made her debut in 2016 with “Nachts ist es leise in Teheran” (“At Night It Is Quiet in Tehran”). Her 2021 novel “Drei Kameradinnen” (“Three Comrades”) was on the longlist of the German Book Prize. The new book arrives at a time when the Nazi era and its entanglement with German families is getting renewed attention. This year, several media outlets reported on a newly published database of the US National Archives that lets people check whether their ancestors were part of the Nazi machinery. Some reviewers have called “Die Lücken” the “novel of the moment”.
The German Book Prize is considered the most important literary awards in the country. It is traditionally presented on the day before the Frankfurt Book Fair opens. Last year, Dorothee Elmiger won for “Die Holländerinnen” (“The Dutch Women”).
This year, five other authors were on the shortlist: Franziska Gänsler (“Orca”), Valeria Gordeev (“Die Zikade entschlüpft ihrer goldglänzenden Hülle”), Elias Hirschl (“Schleifen”), Peggy Mädler (“Selbstregulierung des Herzens”) and Dana Vowinckel (“Anton und Alma”). The jury reviewed 205 titles published between autumn 2025 and early September 2026. It first picked 20 books for the longlist and then narrowed it down to six. The prize totals 37,500 Euro. Bazyar receives 25,000 Euro, and each of the other shortlisted authors gets 2,500 Euro.
