Writer Annegret Held receives the 2022 Roswitha Prize

Message from 17/03/2022

Annegret Heald, Westerwald ambassador and recognized writer, received the 2022 Roswitha Prize from the town of Bad Gandersheim in the county of Northem in Lower Saxony, west of the Harz Mountains. The traditional literary prize for women writers will be given to the public in Bad Gandersheim in the fall of 2022.

Bad Gandersheim / District. The award commemorates the first German female writer, Canons Roswitha von Gandersheim, who wrote historical legends, plays and poems at Gandersheim Abbey in the 10th century. The famous Roswitha Prize is Germany’s oldest literary prize, awarded to women every year.

Jury statement
The jury’s reasoning said, “Angret Heald is a writer who depicts both contemporary urban, rural and provincial realities.” W: Angrit Heald knows what you’re writing about. She comes from Bottom, a small town that she depicts in her novels Schulmerbach, the city which became for her the center of the world, the world she loves, to which she returns again and again, in her books, in her life, she has known the people there for a long time, lived in abject poverty, their story. This area has become dated. In the novels of Apollonia (2012), the great saga Poverty is a Burning Shirt (2015) and Ruberballade (2020) tell the story of Westerwald and her people, never from above, but always from within.

Annegret Held’s current novel “The Wrong Thing and the Right Thing” was published by Eichborn Verlag on February 25, 2022. You can find our review here here.

About Angrit Held
After graduating from high school, Angret Held completed her internship in hospital and spent a year volunteering socially at a self-help organization. From 1982 I trained as a police officer and then worked for three years in Darmstadt and Frankfurt am Main as a police sergeant on patrol duty. From 1987 I studied ethnology and art history. Then she worked various jobs, including as a secretary in a law firm and an assistant in the care sector, as well as an aviation security assistant in the field of passenger screening. Today, she lives as a freelance writer in a village near Kaiserslautern.

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