Frankfurt  - Kathrin Schmidt, a 51-year-old Berlin-based author, won the 25,000-euro (37,000-dollar) German Book Prize on Monday for her novel Du Stirbst Nicht (You're Not Going to Die).

The novel describes a woman who wakes up in hospital after losing many of her memories and painfully reconstructs her life.

The seven judges announced the annual award for best novel written in the German language in Frankfurt's town hall on the eve of the October 14-18 Frankfurt Book Fair. Among five other short-listed novels, which shared consolation prizes of 2,500 euros apiece, was one by this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Herta Mueller,
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Mueller's novel describes the hunger of the Soviet gulags from the point of view of a 17-year-old youth locked up in them when the Second World War ends in 1945. Entitled Atemschaukel in German, it has the English working title "Everything I Own I Carry with Me."

German publishers nominated 154 novels for the German Book Prize, Germany's best-known award for fiction.

The prize, which was instituted in 2004, has provoked criticism from some in Germany's cultural elite who complained that it is oriented to mass reading tastes.  dpa