The 32nd Bachmann Prize has begun. The fact that a literature event has survived for so long is a miracle and was made possible by the founding fathers Humbert Fink and Ernst Willner: They had sufficient delusions of grandeur to reward the winner with the outrageously high sum of 100.000 Austrian Schillings, or 25,000 Euros in today's money. Where so much money is involved, many people are attracted, even if the city is small.

No enthusiasm in the capital

In Vienna they simply turned up their noses because the winner of the small Bachmann Prize received more money than the winner of the Austrian State Prize for the life's work of a literary star, which can be found in Doris Moser’s outstanding thesis on the Bachmann Prize. The bottom line is: You must not save in the wrong places. And: First comes the delusion of grandeur, then (perhaps) the grandeur.

The strangest sentence of this morning

This year, the competition began with Thorsten Palzhoff with a story from Romania. According to the programme, he has been working as a freelance writer since 2008, in other words, for almost 6 months. Hopefully he will continue doing this for a long time. Thorsten was followed by Alina Bronsky, with no publications to her name and therefore no reputation to lose.  Then came the first Austrian, Clemens Setz from Graz. He is only 26 years old and his biography is thus quite short. On the other hand, however, it does include a publication for the year 2009. Age-wise he could be my son and during the reading I was constantly thinking what a load of nonsense I used to write when I was his age. Thank God I did not take part in the Bachmann Prize. That would certainly have been bad for me.

The strangest sentence of this morning comes from him and goes like this, “The hard-boiled egg in the red, wooden egg-cup looked as though it was thinking about something very intensely” How this is supposed to work is something I am now thinking about. So long!