Reading of the Prize Winners 2024

The artists will present their award-winning texts in a joint reading at Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

The young authors deal with political issues, but also express their social anger. There are everyday observations that become a razor-sharp snapshot of the world, as well as many big, sad and heavy themes, which always remain free of kitsch and pathos thanks to a skilful choice of narrative perspective and craft. The texts deal with the human condition, questions of faith and God, martyrdom, death, suicide and trauma. Feminist freedom, reflections on assaults on women throughout history, queerness and transgender are all dealt with. The texts depict friendships across the generations and difficult and cruel parent-child relationships. The authors use satire, caricature and humour with relish and skill and take a warm look at human moments of failure.

Formally, the authors move between strict or idiosyncratic poetry, long poems, short prose, stories or dramatic-performative texts. On the one hand, they follow very strict forms, on the other hand they overcome these and create their own interesting formal frameworks with surprising vocabulary, rhythm and phonetic language. They adopt exciting narrative perspectives, sometimes clear, sometimes convoluted and condensed, contrasting everyday language with poetry. You will hear wild changes in linguistic structures, at once comic-like and very personal.