Hahn, born in 1970 in Ruit in the Fildern region of Swabia, Esslingen district, and resident in Stuttgart, is the 34th recipient of the prestigious literary prize awarded by ZDF, 3sat, and the city of Mainz. Together with ZDF, the author will produce a documentary on a topic of her choice and move into the city writer's apartment in Mainz's Gutenberg Museum.

With her superb knowledge of people and milieus, and her precise and ironic wit, Anna Katharina Hahn is a thoroughly contemporary author. She is the great storyteller of the young bourgeoisie of her Swabian homeland, with all its trials and tribulations, according to the jury: "She combines the relentless accuracy of her observations with an understanding of the touching helplessness and self-deception of her protagonists." Thematically and stylistically, she continues to expand from book to book: from the outskirts of Stuttgart to Spain, from sparse realism to rich allusions to romanticism, to the almost surreal concept of a daughter merging with her mother and her eventful life.

After graduating from high school, Anna Katharina Hahn studied German, English, and European ethnology in Hamburg from 1990 onwards. Since the 1990s, she has published shorter literary works in magazines and anthologies. This was followed by two volumes of short stories ("Sommerloch" (Summer Slump), 2000, "Kavaliersdelikt" (Petty Offense), 2004), before she achieved her breakthrough with critics and readers in 2009 with her novel "Kürzere Tage" (Shorter Days), set among the green-left bourgeoisie of Stuttgart. Her next novel, Am schwarzen Berg (2012), which depicts the upper middle class in times of protest against Stuttgart 21, was also a great success with audiences and critics alike. She received a great deal of attention for her latest novel, Das Kleid meiner Mutter (2016), which depicts the young generation in Spain living in precarious circumstances.

Marianne Grosse, head of the city's cultural affairs department, warmly welcomes the jury's decision: "Anna Katharina Hahn has won many fans in the literary world with her work Kürzere Tage (Shorter Days). The bitter story of the young mother Jutta, who transforms herself from a college dropout with secret desires and sexual repression into a style icon and model mother in the Waldorf school milieu in the bourgeois Stuttgart milieu, is a pleasure to read—and at the same time mentally painful. Jutta not only mutates into the more "sonorous" artificial Judith—with this name, she also takes on a role in which she hardly recognizes herself anymore. A literary tour de force that Hahn continues in her follow-up work, Das Kleid meiner Mutter (My Mother's Dress).

Kürzere Tage (Shorter Days) allows readers to peer into mile-deep abysses. Hahn provides a sharp glimpse behind the noble facades of a supposedly ideal world, where hardly anything seems to fit together anymore and much lies in ruins. A lover of these artistic sketches aptly said of her work: "Hahn X-rays society." I am extremely excited about this author!

Anna Katharina Hahn, who has also worked for the theater, has received numerous awards, including the Clemens Brentano Prize (2005),
the Roswitha Prize
(2010),
the Heimito von Doderer Prize (2010),
and the Wolfgang Koeppen Literature Prize (2012).

Like her predecessors Abbas Khider, Clemens Meyer, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Judith Schalansky, Hahn will produce a documentary on a topic of her choice in collaboration with ZDF and move into the completely renovated city writer's apartment in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.

The award ceremony for the prize, which is endowed with 12,500 euros, took place on March 13, 2018.