Fiston Mwanza Mujila, the Congolese-Austrian author of Tram 83 and The Villain’s Dance, has won the 2026 Erich Fried Prize, one of Austria’s most prestigious literary honors, making him the first African writer to receive the award since its founding in 1990. The prize, worth €15,000, is bestowed annually by the International Erich Fried Society for Literature and Language and funded by Austria’s Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport. It commemorates the Austrian-born poet Erich Fried and is decided each year by a single juror; this year’s judge, German writer and publisher Daniela Seel, was herself selected by a panel including Pegah Ahmadi, Hanna Engelmeier, and Olga Grjasnowa.
Born in Lubumbashi in 1981, Mujila has lived and worked in Graz for years, where he teaches African literatures at the University of Graz, writing across six languages — Chiluba, Lingala, Swahili, French, German, and English — though his fiction and poetry are primarily composed in French. Seel’s citation praised what she called his ability to weave life, dreaming, and thought together with music and the full range of the human voice, from whisper and laughter to lament and praise. Austria’s Vice Chancellor and Minister of Culture Andreas Babler, congratulating Mujila separately, drew an explicit line between the writer and his prize’s namesake, noting that both embody a literature that moves fluidly across national and linguistic borders.
The award caps a body of work that has been internationally recognized for nearly a decade. Mujila’s 2016 debut novel Tram 83, translated into German by Katharina Meyer and Lena Müller, won the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the Peter Rosegger Literary Prize, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. His 2022 follow-up, La Danse du Vilain — published in English as The Villain’s Dance by And Other Stories — won the Prix Les Afriques and was a finalist for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature, while his poetry collection from the same year, Kasala for My Kaku, extended his reputation as a writer working fluently across genre.
The Erich Fried Prize adds to a growing list of honors for Mujila, who has also received the Preis der Literaturhäuser and the George Saiko travel grant, both in 2024, and who has just been named Poet in Residence at the Deutsche Oper Berlin for the 2026/2027 season. The prize will be formally presented on November 15, 2026, at the Literaturhaus Wien, where Seel will deliver the laudatory address.
For a prize that has spent thirty-five years honoring German-language literature’s capacity to cross borders, Mujila’s win reads as an overdue acknowledgment of how thoroughly that border-crossing spirit now runs through African diasporic writing in German — and a reminder that some of the most vital German-language literature being written today is coming from writers who arrived at the language, and reshaped it, from elsewhere.
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