Writer Bert Natter has with his novel At the end of the war won the Libris Literature Prize 2026. The jury calls his award-winning book “a novel that retells a history, our history, that should never be forgotten in an unparalleled, moving but also confrontational way.” Natter received at the awards ceremony in Amsterdam, which was broadcast live News houra check for 50,000 euros.
At the end of the wara cinematically edited novel in parts that follows the adventures of 31 characters in a fictional Nazi concentration camp within one day, starting on the morning of April 20, 1945, is, according to the jury, “a true tour de force”. “Natter shows in an unparalleled way with this richly varied novel that the stories from the Second World War have still not all been told.”
Bringing together many stories is indeed the ambition of Natter’s extensive book: it wants to be a complete novel. The reader follows the day of the camp commander and his sons, but also of other officials in the concentration camp and a handful of Jewish prisoners and resistance fighters who are interned there – some of whom end up in the gas chamber. Natter devised a plot around the missing son of the camp commander, who awaits a chilling fate. Although that fate is no less chilling than that of the countless other prisoners, in the reader’s perception it is perhaps more heartbreaking. This dynamic, with which the novel strongly responds to your feelings and thus aims to explore shades of moral gray, is one of the feats of strength that Natter performs. “Do you want to sympathize with characters responsible for horrors? Do you want to enjoy reading this novel?” the jury wondered.
Natter’s novel, his sixth, has been a hit among reviewers, booksellers and readers since its publication. Last year there was a hype at the annual London book fair: translation rights were sold to seven countries and “a six-figure deal” was concluded with an American publisher, as publisher Thomas Rap proudly reported at the time. The Norwegian translation has now been published (and has been highly praised), the German version will follow this autumn. Still divided At the end of the war also the opinions: what one person thought was a page turner, another found a war of attrition. “Should a novel be written about the German concentration camps?” asked the reviewer The Green Amsterdammer and this newspaper called the novel “deadly tiring and impressive”. Juries also judged differently: the Flemish literature prize De Boon completely ignored the novel, and the Boekenbon Literature Prize chose Charlotte Van den Broeck over Natter, who was also nominated.
Historical-moral force
The jury of the Libris Literature Prize, the most influential of the three major novel prizes in the Dutch language area, praises the novel for Natter’s “great literary skills”, its historical-moral power and how it is inspired by the form: the structure in fragments, which offered the opportunity to unite many perspectives. An unusual form was certainly something that could appeal to this jury, chaired by presenter Noraly Beyer: the constants on the varied and somewhat disparate shortlist were meta-layers (in Peter Buwalda’s The yes man and Peter Terrins Not winter yet) and formal experiments (lots of typographic white in Lieselot Mariëns Like the animalsand the peculiar, layered narrative voice in Nadia de Vries’ Surrender on command). Natter took the cake in this, as can be read in the jury report: his novel shows “that the time is perhaps only now ripe for a new kind of experiential, shifting and almost documentary storytelling about atrocities that, although historical, unfortunately do not belong to the past.”
The novel thus succeeded in showing the jury “a historical period that we already thought we knew”, i.e. the Second World War, now “as if with new eyes”. That is remarkable At the end of the war is the first winner in the 33-year history of the Libris Literature Prize that deals directly with the Second World War – while it is not a topic treated in a neglectful manner in Dutch literature. But Natter’s approach was recognized by the jury as new, and is also appropriate for the type of stories that are currently central to historiography, culture and commemorations. Polyphony is the trend: room for stories from victims, perpetrators and everything in between, where extreme positions can coexist with moral nuances that no longer make it so easy to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘wrong’ people.
Such an approach suits the writer that Bert Natter (1968) is: anything but cautious, with a lot of feeling and not averse to pathos. The versatile Natter has worked as a publisher, journalist and editor-in-chief of the train passenger magazine Railsmade books together with his childhood friend Ronald Giphart, and for example The Rijksmuseum Cookbookbefore he started focusing on his literary writing. Ever since his debut novel Desire has touched us (2008), he seeks extremes in his work, sometimes pushing the boundaries of kitsch – “fortunately, as an opera lover I do not have an aversion to kitsch,” he wrote on his weblog this weekend. At the end of the war is a culmination of that versatility and dedication, the book for which he perhaps should have won the Libris Prize.
