Seghers published her breakthrough novella about a fishermen's uprising, winning the Kleist Prize in 1928.
In 1928, writing under the pseudonym Anna Seghers for the first time, she published Der Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara ("The Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara"), a short novel depicting a failed fishermen's strike in a fictional coastal community. The work was immediately recognized for its spare, powerful prose and its sympathetic yet unsentimental portrayal of collective struggle and class solidarity.
The novella won the prestigious Kleist Prize that same year, a major German literary honor that catapulted the young writer—still working in relative obscurity—into national literary prominence. The award was significant because it validated a work of explicitly proletarian, left-leaning literature within the mainstream German literary establishment during the Weimar Republic.
This debut established the thematic and stylistic hallmarks of Seghers's career: an unflinching focus on ordinary people caught in social and political upheaval, narrative economy, and deep moral seriousness. It also marked her emergence as a writer aligned with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which she had joined in 1928, cementing a lifelong fusion of her literary and political commitments.