Heinrich-Mann-Preis 2025 an Mely Kiyak Preisverleihung

In the organizer's words:

The Heinrich Mann Prize 2025 goes to the essayist Mely Kiyak.

From the jury's statement, which includes Lena Gorelik, Kathrin Schmidt and Asmus Trautsch: "Through her texts, Mely Kiyak has become an important intellectual voice in German society. She devotes herself to socio-political diagnosis as well as artistic debate, with an extremely rare sense of absurdly beautiful comedy. Mely Kiyak plays with the German language, its tempi, stylistic levels and dimensions of expression, while accurately perceiving and describing in detail. Her criticism, which is sensitive to discrimination and bigotry, describes and illuminates, but does not calculate or claim superiority. Ambivalences become recognizable without having to be resolved. Mely Kiyak's novels and columns are characterized by a compassionate, sometimes tender interest in other people, including those who gain their orientation from different socio-economic and cultural starting points."

As a defender of an open democratic society, she continues the tradition of enlightened critical essay writing in the spirit of Heinrich Mann.

Welcome: Manos Tsangaris, President of the Academy of Arts

Laudatory speech: Jan Böhmermann

Reading: Mehmet Yilmaz

Music: Nevzat Akpınar and Haydar Kutluer