32nd GERMAN-DUTCH TRANSLATION AND LITERATURE COMPETITION

With Dirk Brauns

We are very pleased to have won the successful author Dirk Brauns from Germany for our 32nd competition.

Dirk Brauns, born in Berlin in 1968, lived for a long time in Warsaw, Beijing and Minsk as a newspaper correspondent before moving to the Munich area. In 2013, his debut novel Im Inneren des Landes was published, the radio play version of which was “Radio Play of the Month” and is currently being filmed.

Café Auschwitz was remarkably first released in a Polish edition in 2013, followed by the German edition in 2015.

The novel Wir müssen dann fort sein followed in 2016. Die Unscheinbaren was then published in 2019 and is the work selected for the translation and literature competition.

Dirk Brauns „Die Unscheinbaren“

On 26 April, the 32nd DISDH Literature and Translation Competition came to an end after many atmospheric events.

During the award ceremony on 25 April, Julia Bakker from Het Lyceum Rotterdam was named the winner of the translation part of the competition and received an iPad from the Genootschap Nederland-Duitsland from Dorothee de Nijs Bik as 1st prize. Fourteen other winners received valuable vouchers and prizes from the competition sponsors, to whom we would like to express our sincere thanks.

For the first time, the creative part of the competition was organised as a ‘literature parcour’, in which six tasks had to be completed in 90 minutes. These included an interview with the author, an interview with a contemporary witness who had grown up in the GDR, linguistic tasks relating to the competition text and a regional ‘coffee klatch’. The ‘Berlin’ team of three won by a small margin. Congratulations to them!

Dirk Brauns, the German guest author of the literature competition, was able to present and bring to life his unusual inner-German family history in a divided and reunited Germany both during the literature course and in the interview during the award ceremony.

The 32nd literature competition ended with the subsequent DISDH creative competition on 26 April with the presentation of the results of grades 5-11 and an interview with Dirk Brauns prepared and conducted by the students. The students were also responsible for the moderation and musical accompaniment of the event.

Dirk Brauns was so appreciative of the students’ great commitment that plans were made for another visit to The Hague with a “workshop” on journalistic writing.

We are now looking forward to the 33rd competition under the patronage of the Swiss Embassy.

The jury report and an annotated version of the model translation will soon be available on the DISDH website so that all 93 participants in the competition and their teachers can follow their own achievements. Thank you very much for your participation and see you next year.

Here you can find the complete overview of all winners.