Würth Prize for European Literature for Hervé Le Tellier
The 15th Würth Prize for European Literature goes to the French author Hervé Le Tellier. The author receives the award from the Würth Foundation "for the intensity with which he expresses exceptional states of human existence in his wide-ranging work and the originality with which he takes up and develops experiments in the form of modern literature", the jury said in recognition. "Le Tellier is a master of linkage and allusion and of playing with literary genres." The Würth Foundation will present the EUR 25,000 award in April 2026 at the Carmen Würth Forum in Künzelsau.
Hervé Le Tellier was born in Paris in 1957. He studied mathematics, holds a doctorate in linguistics, works as a journalist for Le Monde, among others, and writes for theater, opera and film. He has been a member since 1992 and president since 2019 of the OuLiPo group, a circle of experimental authors that also included Italo Calvino, Oskar Pastior and Georges Perec. He has published novels, short stories, poems, comics and numerous columns. He was awarded the Prix Goncourt for his novel "L'Anomalie" in 2020. "A typical Le Tellier is a Le Tellier who is nothing like the previous Le Tellier," said his translator Jürgen Ritte in an interview with DLF Kultur. The relationship novel "No More Words About Love" is set in the Parisian intellectual milieu. "Nine Days in Lisbon" follows a French journalist in the Portuguese capital. In "Me and the President", a narrator named Le Tellier writes letters to the French president, "a subtle and entertaining read" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). In the autobiographical novel "All the happy families", he takes a critical and melancholy look at his own family.
His latest story, "Der Name an der Wand" (The Name on the Wall), is set in the French provinces, not far from Dieulefit, a place where the French Resistance was particularly active. The author buys a house there and discovers the name of a young resistance fighter carved into the wall. While searching for André Chaix, the author discovers further evidence of a life that ended brutally in August 1944. Chaix was twenty years old when he was killed by shots from a German armored car. Le Tellier not only tells this shockingly short life story, but also a history of the Resistance, of life under occupation, reports on films, music and everyday life in the 1940s and the hidden connections with our present, of Franco-German history and of Europe as we experience it today. It is not a novel about a hero, but a book about courage.
About the Würth Prize for European Literature
The Würth Prize for European Literature, endowed with EUR 25,000, is awarded every two years. The jury, chaired by C. Sylvia Weber, Director of Culture at Würth and member of the Supervisory Board of the Würth Foundation, consists of: Prof. Dr. Dorothee Kimmich, Prof. Dr. Lothar Müller, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ulrich Raulff, Denis Scheck, Marie Schmidt and the winner of the Würth Prize for European Literature 2024, Colm Tóibín.
Previous winners:
• 2024 Colm Tóibín
• 2022 Annie Ernaux
• 2020 David Grossman
• 2018 Christoph Ransmayr
• 2016 Peter Handke
• 2014 Péter Nádas
• 2012 Hanna Krall
• 2010 Ilija Trojanow
• 2008 Peter Turrini
• 2006 Herta Müller
• 2004 Harald Hartung
• 2002 Claude Vigée
• 2000 Claudio Magris
• 1998 Hermann Lenz