Die Frau als Mensch
Woman as Man: At the Beginning of History
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© B. Dietl
About the book
After years of research, Ulli Lust is back with a non-fiction comic about the beginnings of art and the importance of empathy for the survival of our species. A forgotten world unfolds around the archaic female figurines, in which the heroic journey was a group affair – involving women, men, children and even non-binary people in sometimes richly adorned roles.
Jury evaluation
Jury statement non-fiction book of the year 2025
The strong woman as a human being. In her informed and imaginative non-fiction book on the origins of humanity – between evolution and culture – Ulli Lust reveals how the role of women in human history has remained largely invisible. A fundamental revision of the long-dominant image of “man as mankind” is overdue, as this book demonstrates through its unique interweaving of scholarly insights from archaeology, anthropology, and art history, continually inspired by everyday experiences. With this multi-layered approach, Lust succeeds in breaking open long-held assumptions – including those about the genre of non-fiction itself, which she expands in the most beautiful way through her virtuoso combination of image and text.
Jury statement for the nomination
What a title! Even as Ulli Lust tackles the question of the role of women tongue-in-cheek, she takes a sweeping historical journey. The author knowledgeably combines contemporary perspectives from archaeology, anthropology and gender studies. Her perspective is extremely refreshing, and the broad, scholarly scope leads to surprising conclusions. A history rich with female representation over millennia must be read through a female lens. The visual representation of the text as a graphic novel goes far beyond mere descriptive illustration. By engaging with the text in a discursive manner, it adds another layer. “Woman as Man” is virtually a documentary film in graphic novel form, making it a non-fiction book in the truest sense of the word.
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Ulli Lust, born in 1967, emigrated from Vienna to Berlin in 1995. Since then, she has been creating comic reportages with sharp observations about modern everyday life. In 2009, she published “Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest Deines Lebens” [“Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life”] (avant-verlag), an extensive comic about her youth that blends travel and picaresque novel elements with existential teenage drama. The book has been translated into numerous languages and has won several awards, including the Prix de Revelation at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the Ignatz Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in the USA. Her autobiographical graphic novel about an unusual three-way relationship, “Wie ich versuchte ein guter Mensch zu sein” [“How I Tried to Be a Good Person”] (Suhrkamp, 2017), was shortlisted for the “Fauve d’or” in Angoulême in 2018 and won an Ink Pot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con. Since 2013, Ulli Lust has been a professor of illustrative design and comics at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
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