Berlin-based author Ingo Schulze, born in Dresden in 1962, is Mainz City Writer of the Year 2011. The award ceremony for the prize, which is endowed with €12,500, took place on March 10, 2011, in Mainz. ZDF program director Thomas Bellut, Mainz mayor Jens Beutel, and Mainz culture department head Marianne Grosse welcomed Schulze to City Hall as the 27th Mainz City Writer. Like his predecessors, the writer, who was born in Dresden in 1962, will produce a documentary on a topic of his choice in collaboration with ZDF and move into the city writer's apartment in Mainz's Gutenberg Museum. The prestigious literary prize, worth €12,500, has been awarded annually since 1984 by ZDF, 3sat, and the city of Mainz.

ZDF program director Thomas Bellut praised the 48-year-old award winner: "I am delighted that the wonderful and creative author Ingo Schulze has been associated with ZDF for so long: 26 years ago, he received the 'aspekte' literature prize for his debut, and today he receives the prize for his life's work."

Swiss literary critic Andreas Isenschmid gave the laudatory speech for Ingo Schulze: "Schulze's admirable achievement is that he offered all the ingredients of the famous Wende novel in more than one book—minus, of course, anything that was sloganistic or demonstrative. Nothing was missing in these books, neither suffering and lamentation nor cheerfulness, neither the heavy nor the light, neither the serious nor the burlesque. The whole of the East was completely there."

Ingo Schulze is the outstanding chronicler of reunified Germany. With their artful, sophisticatedly light language, his novels and stories have opened the eyes of West Germans, but also of foreigners, to the difficulties people face when switching from one political system to another.

The mayor of Mainz, Jens Beutel, was very pleased with the choice of author as the next city writer: "I wholeheartedly applaud this vote. Ingo Schulze is not only the mediating voice who outlined the ruptures, transformations, and painful new directions with and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in his works—he is also a mature chronicler with a very unique perspective who has captured this phase of German history in calm, pointed, and very readable sketches and has experienced several upheavals in his own life. With Ingo Schulze, we can look forward to a highly interesting author." Marianne Grosse

, head of the cultural department, has long regarded Schulze as one of the leading figures in German literature: "Many years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the literary community was looking for the infamous exemplary 'Wenderoman' (novel about the fall of the Berlin Wall) – and I know that Ingo Schulze doesn't like this term very much. But if any work could be classified under this heading and described that period of upheaval and upheaval, of readjustments in daily life, fears and hopes in an atmospherically accurate and captivating way, it was, in my opinion, Ingo Schulze with his book 'Neue Leben' (New Lives). We are gaining an exciting city writer as Haslinger's successor, who was one of my favorites and whom I am very much looking forward to." Schulze's literary debut in 1995, the collection of short stories "33 Moments

of Happiness," set in St. Petersburg and the surrounding area, already made him known to critics and readers. With Simple Stories (1998), set mainly in Schulze's hometown of Altenburg in eastern Thuringia, and the epistolary novel Neue Leben (2005), Schulze, highly praised by critics, underlined his great artistry in describing the emotional state of the German reunification. His collection of short stories "Handy - Dreizehn Geschichten in alter Manier" (2007) and his latest novel "Adam und Evelyn" (2008), which brilliantly recounts the magical summer of change in 1989, were also very well received. Published this year: "Orangen und Engel. Italienische Skizzen" (Oranges and Angels: Italian Sketches), which was written during a stay at the Villa Massimo in Rome.

Schulze studied classical philology in Jena and was a dramaturge at the Landestheater in Altenburg during the reunification period. He was involved in the Neues Forum (New Forum) and successfully established the "Altenburger Wochenblatt" (Altenburg Weekly). In 1993, he launched an advertising paper in Saint Petersburg. Since the mid-1990s, he has lived in Berlin as a freelance writer and has been honored with numerous awards, including the ZDF's aspekte Literature Prize in 1995.

Further prizes followed, including the Ernst Willner Prize of the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition (1995), the Joseph Breitbach Prize (2001), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the fiction category (2007), and the Thuringian Literature Prize (2007).

Ingo Schulze has been director of the literature section at the Academy of Arts in Berlin since 2010.