We warmly congratulate Ronya Othmann on winning the Jeanette Schocken Prize – Bremerhaven Citizens’ Prize for Literature.

From the jury’s statement:

“In her documentary novel “Vierundsiebzig”, the author, who was born in Munich in 1993, writes about the genocide of the Yazidis by the Islamic State. In research that is as impressive as it is shocking, she investigates the ’74th Ferman’, the 74th massacre of the Yazidis on August 3, 2014.

The daughter of a Kurdish-Yazidi father travels to Turkey and northern Iraq, talks to the people and describes the landscape, constantly reflecting on her own writing process and the pitfalls of language and memory – and realizes how closely her own history is linked to the history of the Yazidis. And just as IS is trying to destroy Yazidi culture with its crimes, Ronya Othmann goes into archives and reconstructs the historical context of the genocide in order to record this history for posterity.

In her novel “Die Sommer” and in her poems, essays and political commentaries, she also uncovers historical falsifications and ideological contradictions and investigates the history of violence and extermination. In doing so, Ronya Othmann makes the search and the will to always start anew the principles of her writing and thus shows what remembrance work can really achieve.”