The German Book Prize, awarded each year at the Frankfurt Book Festival to the best novel of the year, has gone to the Hungarian-born Terézia Mora for her work Das Ungeheuer (The Monster).
Das Ungeheuer tells the story of Darius, who is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his wife, Flora, through Darius’s own story, largely based on a trip to his wife’s native Hungary, and fragments of Flora’s diary, through which it emerges that there were certain things that the wife could not tell the husband in this apparently perfect and certainly loving marriage. Das Ungeheuer constitutes a sequel to Mora’s Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (The Only Man on the Continent), which was longlisted for the German Book Prize in 2009.
Mora was born in 1971 in Sopron, a Hungarian town on the border with Austria. She works in Berlin as a translator. The German Book Prize is worth €25,000.
