US author Susan Sontag was awarded the German book trade’s prestigious Peace Prize on Tuesday for her role as an ”intellectual ambassador” between the United States and Europe and for her human rights activism.
”In a world of falsified images and mutilated truth, she has stood up for the dignity of free thinking,” the prize jury’s citation said.
Sontag (70) is to receive the $17 700 annual prize on October 12 during this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.
”Through her work, which has never lost sight of the European heritage, she has become the most prominent intellectual ambassador between the two continents,” and has also stood up for the rights of victims of war, the jury said.
Sontag, whose works have been translated into more than 30 languages, is popular in Germany. She also spent time in Sarajevo during the Serb siege of the Bosnian city in the 1990s and has campaigned on behalf of jailed and persecuted authors.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she accused US public officials and media commentators of trying to ”infantilise” the public.
”Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” Sontag wrote in The New Yorker magazine shortly after the attacks.
Last year’s prize went to Nigerian-born writer Chinua Achebe.
Past winners also include Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa and former Czech president and anti-communist dissident Vaclav Havel. – Sapa-AP