Conclusion: Authorship as History and Norm

Summary

IN THE YEARS 2015 and 2016, the Seghers Preis only went to one writer, not two. Based on my conversations with Dietger Pforte, former head of the Seghers Stiftung, the decision to give only one award each year was likely due to repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis on the foundation's endowment and the desire of the Seghers Stiftung board not to deplete the prize's funds. It seems that funding limitations are preventing the form of the prize from realizing Seghers's plan of joining authors, making it just another of many prizes that reward exceptional writing. But knowing about the history leading up to the prize and about the lifelong project Seghers shared with her contemporaries to develop solidarian authorship makes it possible to expect more from the award.

Even if the form of the 2016 prize does not reflect coevality, the content of the work by that year's Seghers Preis winner, Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, resonates with conceptions of shared time and the idea of authorship that the Seghers award was intended to recognize and shape. The texts for which Herrera was recognized—published as a trilogy in German translation—are set on the US-Mexican border around the turn of the last century. All three works tell stories about the violence that attends the movement of people and drugs across the border. The narratives highlight the power of the border to separate and hurt people and imply the need for paradigms of imagining human community beyond territories enclosed within national boundaries.

Herrera's novella Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World, 2011), in particular, highlights shared time across space as one way to understand and shape ideas of connection between people living on either side of the Mexico-US frontier. Makina, the protagonist of the novella, embodies this understanding of interrelationship through her work as a switchboard operator in her Mexican village that has “the only phone for miles and miles around.” As a switchboard operator, Makina connects people who are making calls either from Mexico to the United States or from the United States to Mexico.