Wilhelm Lehmann Prize 2026 goes to Prof. Jan Röhnert

This year, Professor Jan Röhnert from the Institute of German Studies will be awarded the Wilhelm Lehmann Literature Prize by the town of Eckernförde. The poet, essayist and literary scholar is receiving the prize for his outstanding essayistic prose in the field of nature writing. He has been publishing poetry collections, essays, literary criticism and academic prose for more than 20 years. For several years now, he has been devoting himself intensively to the genre of nature writing.

Professor Jan Röhnert. Photo credits: Mirette Bakir

“In his precise, essayistic observations of nature, Jan Röhnert also reflects on aspects of the poetics of nature writing. In doing so, he combines the literary perspective on attempts to define and manifestations of new nature writing with the author’s perspective of the nature writer. The extent to which this form of writing has become a writing style for him and how the two intertwine is evident in the volume Wildnisarbeit (Wilderness Work), published in 2025 by Arco Verlag Wuppertal,” the jury stated. “Wildnisarbeit is a hybrid of self-exploration, nature observation, literary quotations and observations. His own poems and photographs, combined with texts that are linguistically convincing in every respect, create a cosmos all of their own.”

The prize, worth 7,500 euros, will be awarded on 9 May 2026 at the Literaturhaus Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel. The laudatory speech will be given by the writer Katja Lange-Müller, winner of the Thomas Mann Prize in 2025. On 8 May 2026, Professor Röhnert will read from his work ‘Wildnisarbeit’ there.

The prize is named after Wilhelm Lehmann (1882–1968), who made a name for himself as a storyteller, poet and essayist. He was awarded the Kleist Prize in 1923 for his early stories and novels. From the late 1920s to the early 1960s, he became an important poet who influenced a whole school of writing. With his poetic observations of nature in ‘Bukolisches Tagebuch’ (Bucolic Diary), written from 1927 onwards, he became a pioneer of German-language nature writing.