The young Viennese author Raphaela Edelbauer is awarded the Austrian Book Prize 2021 for her novel “DAVE”. The jury’s decision was announced on Monday evening at the sixth book award ceremony in Vienna’s casino on Schwarzenbergplatz. The award is endowed with 20,000 euros. The debut prize of 10,000 euros goes to Anna Albinus for “Revolver Christi”.
“DAVE”, released in January this year, is a high-tech dystopia. “We are in the not distant future, the system on earth has collapsed thanks to unchecked global warming and extreme water shortage, in a ‘laboratory’ just above the ground 118,998 people make up the supposed remaining population”, summarized the jury. “The not entirely reliable first-person narrator, the mathematician Syz, is recruited by the dubious laboratory manager to feed DAVE with his memories, the prototype of an artificial superintelligence currently being developed.”
Raphaela Edelbauer created “a nifty science fiction novel with a built-in love story that works according to the laws of thriller. Not only do you talk, you also learn a lot about philosophical debates, consciousness and memory research, computer science and learning systems, whose promises of salvation the author noticeably mistrusts thanks to Edelbauer’s amazing reading. “
Edelbauer was born in Vienna in 1990 and studied language art at the University of Applied Arts. For her prose debut “Entdecker. Eine Poetik ”she was awarded the Rauris Literature Prize in 2018. Also in 2018 she received the audience award at the Days of German-Language Literature in Klagenfurt. With her debut novel “The Liquid Land” (2019) she was on the shortlist of the German Book Prize and the Austrian Book Prize. (APA / Red)
