Friedrich Ulfers Prize to Bob Weil

To round off this trilogy of items brought to you pretty much straight from the Goethe-Institut in New York (hi there!), news of a third award, this time the Friedrich Ulfers Prize. This one goes to individuals who have championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States. That usually means you haven't heard of them unless you work in publishing.

So Bob Weil gets $5,000 for bringing all sorts of dead white German-speaking men to America in his function as Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director at Liveright, a division of W. W. Norton & Company: Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Koeppen, Bertolt Brecht  – and also the lovely and very-much-alive Clemens J. Setz, plus non-fiction from Rüdiger Safranski and the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller. Very impressive.

And – hooray! – he gets his envelope full of used notes at the opening ceremony of the world's coolest literary festival, the Festival Neue Literatur! No clues as yet as to what else the team of crack German-language-lit experts has in store for New Yorkers this coming February, but we can rely on it to be outstanding.