Mapuche poet and Imaginamics Fellow Daniela Catrileo receives the 2026 Anna Seghers Prize

This year’s Anna Seghers Prize was awarded on June 6, 2026, to the renowned Mapuche poet, performance artist, and feminist activist Daniela Catrileo. As recently as January 2026, Catrileo had been a guest of "Imaginamics" and, within the framework of the Working Group on (De)colonial Imagining, offered numerous readings and lectures to students and the interested public on social imagining and aesthetic resistance, as well as on the strategic reinvention of Mapuche cultural identity. One of the highlights of the event series was a bilingual reading and discussion on the topic "Revuelta de cuerpos / Uprisings of the Body," held at the Iberoamérica e.V. cultural center as part of "Imaginamics’" outreach to the city.

The laudatory speech delivered during the formal ceremony at the Berlin Academy of Arts highlighted, above all, the poet’s exploration of hybridity and impurity. Catrileo translates her indigenous family name as "wounded river". The river as infinite movement, continuous sound, and a heterogeneous habitat, but also the grave of numerous victims of the Pinochet dictatorship; and water as a symbolic element of both purity and pollution, simultaneously seam and scar, antidote and trace of injury — are thus central themes in a body of writing that understands itself as a medium and practice of social imagining, aiming to contribute to the healing of the "colonial wound" inflicted upon an indigenous people rendered invisible. At the same time, within her poetics of impurity, she always opens up a future perspective of intercultural coexistence. As she writes, for instance, in her first poetry collection from 2016, The Wounded River:

"There is no purity / no home / in / the movement of water // inhabiting / ----------------- / the cut // the mouth silenced / the tongue and language broken".

And later in the same volume:

"In the wake of the stigma: born / of rage / of poverty / of oblivion / like moss on the water's edge".

The Anna Seghers Prize, worth 12.500 euros each, is awarded annually to one author from the German-speaking world and one from Latin America, the cultural region where Anna Seghers lived in exile. Like Seghers herself, the prize winners are expected to uphold the ideal of contributing to a more just and humane society through the medium of art. This year, the prize went to Daniela Catrileo and the German author Sonja M. Schultz.