Language
arts alumna Miriam Unterthiner receives the Austrian Book Prize 2025 for her debut
Miriam Unterthiner
© Florian Dariz
11. November 2025
Miriam Unterthiner has been
awarded the Austrian Book Prize 2025 in the debut category. The graduate of the Institute for Language Arts was honored for
her theater text Blutbrot ("Blood Bread").
Blutbrot deals with a chapter of South Tyrolean post-war history
that has hardly been addressed in literature to date: the work revolves around the theme of helping Nazi criminals escape
across the Brenner Pass. Eichmann and Mengele, for example, fled via this route—first to Italy, then on to South America.
Untherthiner approaches this difficult subject matter in poetic form, rather
than through realism. Through the personification of real, concrete concepts, “the village,” “the bread,” and “the landscape”
become characters. This creates a different perspective on collective mechanisms of silence and on questions of responsibility,
memory, and guilt.
From the jury's statement: Unterthiner creates a powerful language that visually and precisely
reveals what has been buried, developing a screaming, often desperate humor. With the help of the character Max Brod, the
staple food bread becomes hard to digest. Blutbrot shows how our cruel history is inscribed in our bodies, language, and landscape,
and how it might nevertheless be overcome through a form of “national humanism.”
The text Blutbrot itself was originally
part of a theater trilogy written as part of Unterthiner's master's thesis at the Institute of Language Arts. Among the three
finalists for the debut prize was Anna Maschik, also a graduate of the institute, with her work Wenn
du es heimlich machen willst, musst du die Schafe töten (If you want to do it secretly, you have to kill the sheep).
The Angewandte congratulates on this special success!
