33rd GERMAN-DUTCH TRANSLATION AND LITERATURE COMPETITION

With Dana Grigorcea

We are delighted to announce that the successful author Dana Grigorcea from Switzerland will be taking part in the 33rd competition.

Dana Grigorcea was born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1979. She is a Swiss-Romanian writer and philologist. https://www.grigorcea.ch/8650284/ein-leben

After completing her Romanian and German Abitur at the German School in Bucharest, she studied German and Dutch Philology (M.A.) at the University of Bucharest from 1998 to 2002. Dana Grigorcea then spent a semester abroad at the University of Ghent, Belgium, and studied theatre and film directing at the Erasmus University in Brussels. In 2004, she also completed a two-year Master’s programme in Quality Journalism at the Danube University Krems.

She is a producer of television reports and radio programmes and has worked as a Germany correspondent for Romanian television and radio.

In 2011, she made her debut in German with the novel Baba Rada. She had already started writing exclusively in German in 2003.

Dana Grigorcea has been honoured with numerous awards. In the recent past, these include a place on the longlist for the German Book Prize (2021) and the Swiss Literature Prize from the Federal Office of Culture. In 2023, she was honoured with the Romanian Order of Cultural Merit with the rank of Knight,

Dana Grigorcea frequently travels around Europe and overseas to give readings and lectures. She continues to write reports and essays, for example for the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. She also writes columns for the Zurich Opera House magazine and Deutsche Welle.

In mid-November, the competition assignments for the novel Das Gewicht eines Vogels beim Fliegen, Penguin Verlag, Munich, 2024 https://www.grigorcea.ch/8650263/das-neue-buch and further information will be available on the DISDH website.

Full of hopes and aspirations, the young and aspiring sculptor Constantin Avis travels to New York in 1926. An influential gallery owner wants to take him under his wing and make it big in this city of dreamers and doers. Inspired by a budding love and the prospect of success, he floats through this new life, threatening to lose the ground beneath his feet. For how far can his art really take him?

A whole century later, Dora tries to answer this question. In the early spring on the Ligurian coast, she is writing a novel about Constantin Avis. Together with her son and nanny, she seeks the peace and quiet that she always lacks in her everyday life as an artist and mother. But the deeper she lets herself slip into this other world, the more her story becomes intertwined with Constantin’s, and she realises that she can only answer his questions with her own life.

With unrivalled charm, Dana Grigorcea tells of the intertwining of life and art.

 

The prizewinners will once again receive attractive non-cash and cash prizes.

The jury is looking forward to many successful submissions, which will be honoured during the award ceremony on Thursday, 8 May 2025. On this evening, you can also get to know better the author and her work during interviews and a reading.