Reading competition in Klagenfurt: Bachmann Prize winner Ana Marwan: Powerful and yet speechless

“Sometimes in the evening, when I look in the mirror, I think to myself: Today I was for nothing.” – This sentence of her first-person narrator from the text “Green Toad” probably does not come to mind for the 42-year-old Slovenian writer Ana Marwan on Sunday evening must have come. She wasn’t in vain, but she was the star, the winner of the 46th Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (25,000 euros). That left her speechless at the award ceremony at noon. Overwhelmed, she just said, “I didn’t expect that. Hvala! Thanks!”