Mortier won the prize with a sentence from his novel ‘Godenslaap' (Divine sleep): "I follow the cadence of my script and seek out the pious, letter-bound lust of the girl I must have been once, that wench on the brink of adolescence, binding up her prose as tightly as her thin-laced bootees - how she crammed the flesh of her words into the whalebones of syntax, until her own body was covered in weals and she longed to break out." (translation by Ina Rilke)
The winner of the Tzum Award receives one euro for every word. Previously, the award went to Paul Mennes (2002), Jeroen Brouwers (2007) and A. F. Th. van der Heijden (2008).
