She is our RUTH Award winner for 2026! The festival honours the songwriter Dota Kehr for her Mascha Kaléko programme ‘In der fernsten der Fernen’ (In the Farthest of the Far). The jury's statement on the award of the German world music prize reads: `Dota Kehr has captured the ironic, tender and often melancholic tone of Kaléko's 1920s big-city poetry, breathing new life into the poems and making them sound as if they had just been written in this form. The great art of an intelligent poet meets the colourful settings of an intelligent musician.´

The full jury statement can be found here

Photo Annika Weinthal