Philippe Sands receives Austrian Book Trade’s Honorary Award

Since 2017, the annual literary-musical matinee in honour of the current winner of the Austrian Book Trade’s Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action has been the crowning finale of the European Literature Days. The 2023 prize winner, Philippe Sands, has now been announced. The award ceremony will take place on 19 November 2023, 11:00 a.m. in the Klangraum Krems Minoritenkirche (moderation and discussion with the author: Katja Gasser, laudatory speech: Ernst Strouhal, music: Duo Sonoma).

Artistic Director Walter Grond is particularly pleased that the British-French writer, lawyer and professor of international law, Philippe Sands, whose books he has long appreciated, will be awarded this year's Tolerance Prize. Sands' commitment to human rights, international law and the enshrinement of ecocide in international criminal law fits perfectly with this year's leitmotif of the European Literature Days, "Animals and Other People", Grond said. "It is about an expanded concept of tolerance and law if we include all living beings in the sense of living together as brothers and sisters. During its breathtakingly rapid rise in the industrial age, humanity, which rules over the earth, has forgotten to live in harmony with itself and nature. Recent scientific research, for example, attributes reason, language, self-awareness, the ability to suffer and moral behaviour to animals. This raises new moral questions: Do humans have to rethink their relationship to themselves and their coexistence with other living beings on earth? How do we treat animals and how should we treat them? These are also current thematic fields in international contemporary literature."