The author Ronya Othmann has been awarded the Bremerhaven Jeanette Schock Literature Prize, endowed with 10,000 euros. In her work, Othmann shows "what remembrance work can really achieve", the jury explained. In her autobiographical novel "Vierundsiebzig", the daughter of a Kurdish-Yazidi father writes about the genocide committed against the Yazidis by the Islamic State terrorist group in 2014. The basis for this was research in northern Iraq and within her own family.
Othmann, who was born in Munich in 1993 and lives in Leipzig, is concerned with securing traces of the crimes committed and interweaving these reports with her own story.
The prize will be presented to her on May 10 at the Historical Museum in Bremerhaven. The award is presented every two years in memory of the book burning by the National Socialists. Jeanette Schocken from Bremerhaven was murdered in a Nazi extermination camp.
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