The Treffen junger Autor*innen offers young writers a platform on which they can present their texts, thus creating attention for their concerns, topics and points of view.
The Treffen junger Autor*innen invites people aged 11 to 21 throughout Germany to submit their self-written texts. The topic and style can be freely chosen: Whether stories, short narratives, plays, slam poetry, poems, spoken word or experimental narrative forms - all text forms can be submitted.
An independent jury will select about twenty authors and their texts from the applications, who will be invited to the Treffen junger Autor*innen in Berlin as prize winners.
The Treffen opens up a protected space in which the young artists can meet, inspire each other, and be encouraged to further develop their personal artistic expression through the professional guidance of experienced authors and workshop leaders.
The Treffen junger Autor*innen is part of the Treffen junge Szene of the Berliner Festspiele and is funded as a national contest by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
A jury of nine members, which is made up of writers and journalists, chooses about 20 young authors that they consider exemplary and outstanding based on the manuscripts that are submitted in a process involving several stages. The prize is an invitation to the Treffen junger Autoren. A further 20 writers receive book tokens for their texts. What is decisive for the selection is, among other things, how creatively the stories are told and the imagery is constructed as well as how the mood and atmosphere are expressed.
All prizewinners read an excerpt from their texts in front of an audience in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. During rehearsals for the reading event, they will be advised and supported on how to present their texts by writers from the jury.
The Treffen junger Autor*innen is the first opportunity for some of the participants to meet and exchange ideas with other young writers. To ensure that this succeeds in the best way possible within the short space of five days, a Campus for the participants offers workshops in the different literary genres of poetry, prose and drama alongside cross-genre writing experiments. In discussions, the focus is on different aspects of writing. Editorial talks with the writers on the jury prepare the prize-winning texts for publication in the anthology.
Young writers may find out where the path of writing may lead to from former participants who remain in touch with and who visit the Treffen. New work by former prizewinners is presented in the Perspektiven series. The Forum of the Treffen junger Autor*innen is aimed at teachers and disseminators. It provides practice-orientated further training in literary writing and an exchange platform for colleagues.