Award ceremony in Frankfurt

Author Shida Bazyar won the 2026 German Book Prize for her novel "Die Lücken" on 5 October during an award ceremony in the Kaisersaal of the Frankfurt Römer. The event serves as the traditional opening to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Bazyar was selected from six shortlisted authors, a group that included Valeria Gordeev, author of "Die Zikade entschlüpft ihrer goldglänzenden Hülle" and previous winner of the 2023 Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis and the 2026 aspekte-Literaturpreis. Jury representative and Börsenverein board member Sebastian Guggolz announced the decision.

The novel 'Die Lücken' reflects almost one hundred years of ambivalent German life based on individual fates of characters.

In her acceptance speech, Bazyar described mixed feelings about receiving an award for a book chronicling persecution, terror, and murder. She noted that recorded anti-Semitic and racist offenses in Germany have reached peak levels, adding that every minority group currently has reason for concern. Bazyar cited a quote from political theorist Hannah Arendt regarding the year 1933.

The problem, the personal problem was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did.

Provincial history and narrative structure

Published in September 2026 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, "Die Lücken" centers on the fictional Hunsrück village of Heimesbach, an analogue for Bazyar's hometown of Hermeskeil near Trier. The narrative spans from the 1920s to the 2010s, uncovering how local residents participated in National Socialist policies when the town operated as a model Nazi village ("Gaumusterdorf"). A deceased narrator guides the story across time, shifting between victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and late-twentieth-century immigrants.

The novel intertwines several generational timelines. In the 1920s, two friends named Johanna and Lore dance in a tavern where decades later a character named Saman drinks beer, unaware that one woman betrayed the other out of ambition during the Nazi era. In the 1990s, Lore's sister Anni resides in a nursing home where an Iranian immigrant named Parvaneh works as a caregiver. Parvaneh later takes her daughter Bahar to a birthday celebration for a girl named Petra, whose grandmother worked during the 1980s at Modehaus Wagner, a business operating in a department store previously seized from Jewish owners.

Archival research and literary background

Bazyar integrated documented historical records into the novel, detailing the November 1938 pogroms, the aryanization of Jewish properties, and the post-war whitewashing of local perpetrators. She preserved the actual names and biographical facts of former Jewish residents from Hermeskeil, including the veterinarian Heinz Kahn, who was born there 66 years before Bazyar. When later offered honorary citizenship, Kahn declined the gesture due to his family's fate during the Holocaust.

My father also received a lot of medals and was gassed anyway.

Bazyar began investigating her hometown's past in 2019 after reading a study by a local historian on Jewish life under National Socialism. She chose to set the book in the fictionalized town of Heimesbach to allow broader literary freedom while grounding specific biographies in archival facts. The work connects provincial German memory to her own background as the child of political refugees who left Iran for Rhineland-Palatinate in the late twentieth century.

If I now say that I am writing about Hermeskeil, then I would also have to commit myself to certain other historical matters.

"Die Lücken" is Bazyar's third novel, following "Nachts ist es leise in Teheran" in 2016 and "Drei Kameradinnen", both published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. In May 2026, the English translation of her debut novel was nominated for the International Booker Prize. The author's recognition at the Frankfurt Book Fair follows her involvement in local commemorative projects in the Hunsrück region.