Awards: Book prize winner Zora del Buono: “I was in a big drive”

Zora del Buono has been honored with the Swiss Book Prize 2024 for her novel “Seinetwegen”. It is not the first and will not be the last literary research into her family history, as she told Keystone SDA on Sunday.

Zora del Buono, you seemed very composed during your short speech after the announcement that you were to receive the book prize. Is that your nature or did you secretly expect it as the widely touted favorite?

Zora del Buono: Personally, I was expecting one of my young colleagues to win. We saw at the German Book Prize that it doesn’t necessarily mean much if you’re the favorite. I wouldn’t have begrudged it to the others either. (Editor’s note: Zora del Buono was on the longlist for this year’s German Book Prize with “Seinetwegen”).

Looking at the shortlist for the Swiss Book Prize, it’s noticeable that you’re not the only one to have dealt with your family’s past. Is that a coincidence or a trend?

Zora del Buono: It’s nothing new in literary history. You work with your own things. When it concerns you, the story takes on a greater urgency, which the Book Prize jury obviously appreciated.

“Seinetwegen” is not the first time you have dealt with your family history. What is it that ties you so closely to your family history?

Zora del Buono: I intend to create a trilogy. The first was the novel “Die Marschallin” (2020) about my grandmother, then a great “Fräulein-Roman” about unmarried women in the 1960s and 70s with my aunt as a role model. This was actually intended to be the second novel, but now I’ve brought forward the third part with “Seinetwegen”. In “Marschallin”, my grandmother in the sophisticated southern Italian family proved to be a good character for a novel. This gave me the idea to continue here.

In your acceptance speech, you spoke of a “quick book”. But the research for it will probably not have been that quick?

Zora del Buono: I was in a big drive, I wanted to know. I pushed it forward until I realized from time to time that it was perhaps moving too quickly. That’s why I included the coffee house conversations with friends, in which the whole thing is repeatedly broken up and reflected upon.

So these conversations are not fiction either?

No, they all took place. But of course my book is not a journalistic text, but a literary one.

In your novel, we learn a lot about the “killer” E.T., as you call him, but not about your father, whom you lost as a child. Why is that?

I noticed that myself. That’s why I put a stop at the end when describing E.T., so that you don’t find out as much about him as you do about my father. But the book has given me so much feedback from people who knew my father personally, which I can now incorporate into my “Fräulein novel”.

SDA