Mely Kiyak, © Svenja Trierscheid
Heinrich Mann Prize 2025 to Mely Kiyak
Award Ceremony
The Heinrich Mann Prize 2025 goes to the essayist Mely Kiyak. From the statement of the jury, which includes Lena Gorelik, Kathrin Schmidt and Asmus Trautsch: “Mely Kiyak has become an important intellectual voice in German society. She is dedicated to self-knowledge, political diagnosis and social and institutional criticism. She interweaves precise analyses with radical introspection and an extremely rare sense of absurdly beautiful comedy expressed in political statements.”
Welcome: Manos Tsangaris, President of the Akademie der Künste
Laudation: Jan Böhmermann
Reading: Mehmet Yilmaz
Music: Nevzat Akpınar and Haydar Kutluer