Enlarge image
Mourning for Birgit Vanderbeke (photo from 2018)
Photo: Julian Vanderbeke / dpa
The author Birgit Vanderbeke is dead. She died unexpectedly on December 24th, announced the Piper Verlag in Munich.
The publisher relied on the family of the writer who lived in the south of France.
Vanderbeke was 65 years old.
»With Birgit Vanderbeke, German-language literature is losing a powerful, headstrong and unmistakable voice.
Our condolences go to her husband and her family, «said Piper publisher Felicitas von Lovenberg according to the announcement.
Vanderbeke was born in Dahme, Brandenburg, in 1956, but moved to Frankfurt am Main with her family in 1961.
There she later studied law, German and Romance languages.
Her story "Eating the mussels" is best known.
Books such as "Alberta receives a lover" and her autobiographical trilogy of novels are also part of the canon of contemporary literature, according to the publisher.
The author has also received many literary prizes, such as the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Kranichsteiner Literature Prize.
In 2007 she received the Brothers Grimm Professorship at Kassel University.
bbr / dpa
