The national publishing award Deutscher Verlagspreis honors the excellence of small and independent publishers of all genres and colors—and it’s a true joy to be recognized, for the third time, in such an outstanding way.

A heartfelt thank you to the jury for this recognition of K. Verlag’s publishing practice—and to all the brilliant people who make our journey possible: the artists, authors, editors, and curators who shape each project with care and courage; the designers, text editors, and translators who bring thought into form; our printing partners, distributors, and the committed community of booksellers and librarians across the globe; and, above all, our readers. Your ongoing engagement and support mean the world to us.

“The tragedy,” James Baldwin once observed regarding the condition of the world, “is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits.”

In the decades since Baldwin’s words, artists, writers, and thinkers around the world have continued to call for more attentive, expansive, and radical practices of care—even as capitalist cultures have tightened their grip on life through security, accumulation, and disposability. In an era marked by disorientation and systemic crises, Pensées soignées proposes writing and translation not just as literary acts, but as modes of relation, resistance, and repair.

If thought seems helpless, perhaps it is because it has forgotten how to care—for the world, for others, for itself. What does it mean to think as an act of care? What does it mean to bandage, to tend, to hold open the possibility of recovery?

In The Immense Regression, the first volume of his two-part philosophical opus What Is Called Caring?, Bernard Stiegler returns to the existential question of care as the most urgent task of thinking in the Anthropocene. Masterfully translated by his longtime friend and collaborator Daniel Ross, this is Stiegler at his most provocative, timely, and necessary.

The collection of writing, I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza, by poet and culture worker Mahmoud Al-Shaer is a searing testimony written over the past year and a half from inside Gaza. With breathtaking lucidity and devastating intimacy, Al-Shaer uses his voice to record the quotidian Palestinian struggle while resisting erasure and bearing witness to unbearable loss and violence.
The book is dedicated to the author’s three-year-old twins, Majd and Nai, with all proceeds from its sale going directly to his family.

The dispatches gathered in this book offer far more than a chronicle of destruction; with composure and clarity, Al-Shaer offers readers a vital affirmation of presence, relation, and survival. From the wreckage of homes and futures, the author builds a shelter with language itself. His writing—raw, lyrical, and defiant—refuses the daily cruelties imposed by the ongoing war, demanding instead that the world face these atrocities as their own. On every page, Al-Shaer relays an ethical insistence: I am still alive.

We are a Berlin-based publishing atelier advancing new forms of the book-as-exhibition. We collaborate internationally with artists, authors, and institutions to develop publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design open radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.