The 2016 Audiobook Prize winners
A media genre gains attention thanks to outstanding performances.
Baba Dunja is the first former resident who, at a ripe old age, returns to her home village near Chernobyl. In the midst of the death zone, she means to spend the self-determined evening of her life. The actress Sophie Rois recites the story of Baba Dunja with a cracking voice ; the tale of an older woman who takes responsibility for a murder she did not commit. For this “listening experience”, as the jury calls it in its statement, Rois received the 2016 German Audiobook Prize for best female performer. “Sophie Rois doesn’t read the part; she is Baba Dunja“, the statement continues. This is the second time that Rois has been given the prize.
Since 2003 the German Audiobook Prize has been awarded every year to outstanding audiobook productions and presented at the literature festival lit.COLOGNE. That year the prize was launched by West German Radio and the WDR media group; now, together with the German Publishers and Booksellers Association and others, its own association has been founded. The aim of the Audiobook Prize is to reflect the diversity of the current audiobook market and create a seal of quality for audiobooks.
“Perfect listening cinema”
The German Audiobook Prize is awarded in eight categories, each of which is endowed with 3,333 euros. The German actor Lars Eidinger received the coveted award for best male performer. He read “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”, an early story by David Foster Wallace and the first audiobook that Eidinger has recorded. The prize for best radio play went to the director Christoph Kalkowski and the composer Raphael D. Thöne for their monumentally orchestrated radio play We based on a re-discovered novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. “Bombastic and gentle, intoxicating and sobering. Perfect listening cinema!” judged the jury. As the best non-fiction audiobook, Germany. Memories of a Nation prevailed against its rivals. Speaker Burghart Klaußner and director Burkhard Schmid convincingly succeed, said the jury, in “narratively capturing” Neil MacGregor’s historical miniatures and presenting a “fascinating overall picture with a powerful reverberation”.
Honored in the category of best entertainment was the Munich actor and speaker Philipp Moog for his reading of Mario Giordano’s detective story parody Tante Poldi und die sizilianischen Löwen (Aunt Poldi and the Sicilian Lions). The special prize, awarded every two years, went for the first time to an ensemble: Oliver Rohrbeck, Jens Wawrczeck and Andreas Fröhlich as “Die drei ???” (i.e. The Three ???). A children’s jury awarded a prize to Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte (The Never ending Story) in an entirely new radio version.
Audiobook Prize Award Ceremony, 8 March2016 in Cologne
