Date: Thursday, January 12
Time: Doors at 7:00, readings from 7:30
Location: Hallesches Haus (Tempelhofer Ufer 1)
Entry: €3
🎉 Join us on January 12, 2023 for the 2022 Berlin Writing Prize-Giving Party! 🎉
We will celebrate our winners, toast our judges and sponsors, enjoy readings, drinks, and all the good old literary chat!
There will be readings from our winning authors and shortlisted writers, including first-prize winner, Rachel Swearingen, who will be on her one-month residency at The Circus Hotel.
Eight writers in total will be reading from their work: Check out this AMAZING line-up!!
1 SHORTLISTED (Gorgeous) Matt Perkins is a British fiction writer, currently working in Munich as a freelance writer and editor. He’s had short-fiction published in The White Review, as well as non-fiction, reviews and translations in several places including Condé Nast Traveller, World Literature Review, and Asymptote Magazine. He’s working on a novel about a text-adventure game designer, set in Leipzig.
2 SHORTLISTED (Empire of Light) Young Rader lives and writes in Berlin. His work has appeared in the Chicago Review, New England Review, Little Star, Passages North, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the 2022 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. He will read from something he’s been working on called: My Education
3 SHORTLISTED (The River at the End of the Road) Hillary Millán is an emerging writer from the United States. She has worked as an English teacher in Colombia and a Spanish teacher in Vietnam. She currently lives in Tallinn, Estonia, with her Chilean husband and their two young children, and works for Visit Estonia as their English-language content creator.
4 SHORTLISTED (Off Grid) Deirdre Shanahan’s work has been included in ‘The Best of British Short Stories’, from Salt, won the Wasafiri Fiction Prize, shortlisted for the London Writing Awards and selected by Toby Litt for MIRonline. She was longlisted for the BBC’s Short Story Award in 2018 and 2022 and won the Arts Council England Award and a grant to undertake research on a novel. She’s also the author of a story collection and a novel published with Bluemoose Books.
5 SHORTLISTED (Before, behind, between, above, below) Mary Franklin has just finished the Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA at UEA. In 2019, she wrote a new version of Carmen, the libretto of which was published by Oberon. She is currently working on an adaptation of Sweet William by Beryl Bainbridge. She worked freelance for Jarvis Cocker on his book Good Pop, Bad Pop, published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. Mary’s work has been published by Tar Press, been longlisted for the Brick Lane Book Shop Prize 2022, received an honourable mention in the Galley Beggar 2022 Prize and shortlisted for the Berlin Prize 2022. Mary is currently halfway through a novel – I’d Much Rather Be With The Boys – about intimacy, cruelty, sexuality and accountability set in the upper echelons of Oxford University’s all-male drinking societies, as told by the only girl allowed in.
6 RUNNER UP (in this soft place) Rosemarie Geary is an Irish writer of fiction and poetry. Her poetry has been published in the anthology All Becomes Art and she was a runner up in the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Prize. She is currently working on her debut novel.
7 RUNNER UP (Undiagnosed) Lukas Kofoed Reimann is a trans* writer, scholar, and teacher who lives in Berlin. His writing is often concerned with questions of identity and belonging and explores his experiences of transition and chronic pain in particular. He is a passionate reader of all kinds of trans* literature and continually hopes to empower others to tell their stories. In 2019 he wrote his masters thesis on trans* autobiography and kinship. Lately his work has been published in english in Oranges Journal and in danish in Addenda.
8 WINNER (Clown School) Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year. Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prixe in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. She lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program.
The three winning writers will be published by SAND Journal online.
All of us at the Reader – and our wonderful judges (those that can make it!), Jennifer Hewson, Ben Fergusson, Katrin Schönig, Ashley Moore, and Sharon D. Mertins – look forward seeing you!
Special thanks go out to our sponsors and partners for making the 2022 Berlin Writing Prize possible: Hallesches Haus, Another Country Bookshop, The British Council, The Circus Hotel, and SAND Journal.
