The festival honours the songwriter for her Mascha Kaléko programme ‘In der fernsten der Fernen’ (In the Farthest of the Far).

This is the jury's reasoning for awarding the German World Music Prize:
'After a concert, a fan gives her a booklet of poems by Mascha Kaléko. Dota Kehr discovered a kindred spirit in them, being impressed by their directness, irony, heartfelt passion, and simple elegance. She is sometimes shocked by the topicality of some of the verses, for example 'Der Fremde' (The Stranger). She begins to write music for them. With success: 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. That's what the RUTH 2026 is for.´

Dota Kehr became known as 'Die Kleingeldprinzessin' (The Small Change Princess) in the early 2000s. Since 2013, she and her band have been releasing music under the name DOTA. She recorded two of her albums in Brazil, collaborating with artists such as Chico César and Danilo Guilherme.

Dota Kehr would like to donate the prize money associated with the RUTH in equal parts to Médecins Sans Frontières and to her colleague and friend, the Brazilian musician Danilo Guilherme, to cover the treatment costs of his ALS disease.

The award ceremony and RUTH concert with Dota Kehr will take place on Sunday 5 July in Heinepark.