An expert jury consisting of Björn Jager, director of the Hessian Literature Forum in the Mousonturm, literary editor Alf Mentzer and freelance literary critic Beate Tröger, unanimously decided on the winners.

With Marion Poschmann, the jury is honoring a writer who, with five volumes of poetry and in particular her current volume "Nimbus", is one of the most important German-language poets. Her poems are "profoundly humorous and at the same time familiar with the tradition and forms of Western poetry and attentive to the present". Beate Tröger particularly praises the fact that the poems are both historically aware and contemporary, precise and yet open, self-confident and subtle.

Marion Poschmann was born in Essen and now lives in Berlin. She has received numerous prestigious awards for her poetry and prose, including the 2021 Bremen Literature Prize for her poetry collection Nimbus and the WORTMELDUNGEN Literature Prize in the same year. Most recently, she received the Joseph Breitbach Prize for her complete works in 2023.

In her debut "dekarnation" - published by Literaturverlag Droschl in 2018 - Eva Maria Leuenberger takes us "deep into an archaic, pre-civilizational world and works with the greatest possible reduction. In an outstanding way, she succeeds in penetrating to the core of our existence," says Björn Jager.

Eva Maria Leuenberger, born in Bern, studied at the Bern University of the Arts and now lives in Biel. Her work has won several awards, including the Basel Poetry Prize (2020) and two literary prizes from the Canton of Bern (2020).

The award ceremony and reading took place on September 15, 2020 at the Kulturforum Schillerplatz. The Orphil Prize is awarded every two years to poets who take a stand with their work and know how to resist political and stylistic fashions. The founder is Ilse Konell, the widow of the poet George Konell, who died in 1991 and lived in Wiesbaden for many years.

The event is organized by the Wiesbaden Cultural Office in cooperation with hr2-kultur.