Berliner Felicitas Hoppe writes novels, memoirs and essays about adventures and discoveries, and the 50,000-euro ($64,655) Büchner prize should help her finance future literature.

"Beginning with the 1986 collection 'Picknick der Friseure' [The Hairdressers' Picnic], Hoppe has brought her work forward in many voices," the Büchner prize jury said when awarding her the coveted prize on Saturday in Darmstadt.

"In laconic and lyrical - strong-willed and modest - prose, she has created a narrative universe in which the fundamental issue of a 'postmodern' existence with free and freeing imagination is played through," they added.

The Georg-Büchner-Preis, awarded by the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt, is the most distinguished literary prize in Germany.

Hoppe, born in December 1960, began studying literature, rhetoric, religion, Italian and Russian in 1980.

Since 1996, she has made her living as an author in Berlin.

mkg/jlw (epd, KNA)