Sharon Dodua Otoo takes €25,000 Ingeborg Bachmann prize with Herr Gröttrup Sits Down, about the rocket scientist who worked for the Nazis, then the USSR

When Sharon Dodua Otoo moved from Ilford to Hanover as an au pair in 1992, her family were concerned. Would a black girl from outer London cope with provincial Germany? “They were really panicked about it. ‘Don’t stay too long,’ they said.”

Twenty-four years later Dodua Otoo not only still lives in Germany, but has just won arguably the most prestigious award in the German language, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize – for the first and only short story she has ever written in the language of her adopted homeland.

Her entry, Herr Gröttrup Sits Down, is centred on the historical figure of Helmut Gröttrup, a scientist who worked first on the Nazis’ V2 rocket, then on the Soviet rocketry programme and later wound up inventing the chip card. In a twist that stretches the conventions of anthropomorphism to their limits, the story is partially narrated from the perspective of an unboiled egg.

At the prize event in Klagenfurt, the jury hailed Dodua Otoo’s story as a surrealist parable grappling with fundamental philosophical issues around identity and otherness, drawing comparison with the work of Austrian absurdist Thomas Bernhard and the German comedian Loriot. “You have this British author telling the story of a forgotten chapter of German history – I think that’s incredible,” said critic Sandra Kegel, who had nominated Dodua Otoo for the competition.

A review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described the prize-winning story as “the kind of work of literature that you have to go searching for because it hardly knows how sought after it is”.

The accolade is likely to provide a major career break for a writer who has until now only published two short novellas with Edition Assemblage, a small leftwing German publishing house that specialises in nonfiction.

Dodua Otoo submitted her story on the suggestion of a friend, without being aware of the prize’s significance. “That was probably a good idea,” she told the Guardian, “otherwise I wouldn’t have submitted anything.”



Since winning the €25,000 (£21,000) prize, which is chosen using a three-day X-Factor-style competition screened live on Austrian, German and Swiss television, Dodua Otoo has been swamped with offers from German publishing houses and literary agents. She is determined to take the opportunity to turn the short story into a novel. “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity”, she said.

Raised in a “very strict Ghanaian household” in Ilford, Dodua Otoo studied German and management studies at Royal Holloway University after a year-long stint in Hanover and now lives in Berlin with her four sons.

Though she describes herself as a “black British mother, activist, author and editor”, her feelings towards her country of birth are mixed, she said. “I have a British passport and London is my home, but there was still this something in the background music that said: ‘You don’t really belong here.’

“British people know how to be polite and not to use the n-word, but I still felt there is a glass ceiling. In Germany, people say really stupid things to your face, and they say it with a smile because they don’t know it’s racist, but it just feels so refreshingly honest. I can deal with that.”

As an example, she cited the fact that some German journalists had insisted on carrying out interviews with her in English even after she had just won a prize for a German-language piece of fiction: “If you’re being confronted with images of war-torn refugees all the time and then you sit in front of a black person who is just like you, sometimes that just crashes your hard drive.”

Recently, Dodua Otoo said, Germany’s anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland had held a small demonstration right outside her Berlin flat, chanting “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”). She and her eldest son had simply shouted back at them from their window, chanting: “No, we are the people too.”

The desire to make a stand against xenophobia and rightwing populism may have also played a part in the jury awarding her the prize, she said, “but I think in the end they voted for the quality of the story”.



She cites German-language writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch as inspiration, for “combining sharp analysis of society with humour”, as well as Toni Morrison and Mildred D Taylor, “women writers who made the black experience in the US very tangible to me”.

“Politics can be very polarising and confrontational. With my writing, I would like to say: we can go out and demonstrate, but at the end of the day all we all want is to be understood and be treated with empathy.”

