Ingeborg Drewitz Literature Prize for Prisoners
The Ingeborg Drewitz Literature Prize for Prisoners , founded in 1988 and named after the German writer Ingeborg Drewitz , who most emphatically advocated the concerns of prisoners, aims to encourage prisoners to write authentic texts and to make this prisoner literature accessible to the public. The literary prize has so far been awarded every three to four years and the type of text is largely open.
issue
The basic idea was and is to let the inmates (and former inmates), who have no public lobby , speak for themselves, so that they don't always talk about them, but rather to get their experiences authentically shared by them. The Ingeborg Drewitz Literature Prize , which is unique in Germany in this form, represents a complementary factor in German cultural life. This is also shown in the fact that Martin Walser , George Tabori , Luise Rinser , Friedrich Magirius , ( Superintendent in Leipzig and pastor of the local Nicolaikirche) as well as the then Minister of Education of North Rhine-Westphalia , Hans Schwier , could be won as patrons . The patron in 2008 was Heinz Müller-Dietz , a commentator on the penal law, in 2011 the sculptor Siegfried Neuenhausen took over this function , 2015 the writer (and ex-prisoner) Peter Zingler , 2018 the lawyer (and ex-prison director) Thomas Galli .
Structures
From the numerous submissions, the jury will select the most qualitatively successful and impressive texts ( poems , stories , extracts from novels , diary entries , reports , letters , radio plays, etc.). The awarded contributions will then be published in an anthology . The jury consists of six jurors . The basic idea of the award includes the equal composition of the jury of (partly former) prisoners and non-prisoners. The latter mostly tries to attract personalities from the fields of literary criticism , journalism or criminology . The initiator of the award, the Germanist Helmut H. Koch, also belongs to the jury from the start .
The sponsors of the award include the Dortmund prisoners' initiative , the prison archive at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences, and the Chance e. V. Münster (an association for criminal assistance), the Humanist Union of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Federal Conference of Catholic Prison Chaplains , the Federal Conference of Protestant Prison Pastoral Care in Germany and the Documentation Center for Prisoners' Literature of the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster.
Anthologies
- Cracks in purgatory . 1989.
- Captive balloon . 1992.
- Stolen sky . 1995.
- If walls could tell . 1999.
- News from Otherworld . 2002.
- Nothing begins. Nothing happens. Nothing ends. 2005.
- Noises of the night . 2008.
- Every night the devil laughs softly . 2011.
- Lonely together . 2015.
- Encounters in the world of absurdity . 2018.