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»quir quir« – what was that? (»quir quir« – was war das?)
The Anthology of Nominees And Winners of The Leonce-and-Lena-Prize (Die Anthologie der Nominierten und Preisträger des Leonce-un
- 176 pages
- Softcover
- With a greeting by the mayor
- of the science city of Darmstadt, Hanno Benz,
- and a preface by Christian Döring,
- as well as information
- about the editors and jurors
978-3-86638-466-8
The jury—consisting of Frieder von Ammon, Yevgeniy Breyger, Dagmara Kraus, Nadja Küchenmeister and Alexander Schnickmann, winner of the previous competition in 2023—has awarded Sandra Burkhardt the 2025 Leonce and Lena Prize for a large-scale text.
The sponsorship prizes named after the poet Wolfgang Weyrauch go to Ana Tcheishvili and Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç.
Congratulations to all three of them—and we also wish the seven nominees the best of luck in their future poetic endeavors. It is wonderful to have them all in our anthology for the award, with a total of around 100 poems.
The judges wrote in their statement: »Only when everything has been laid bare can the self enter the world. A self that repeatedly revisits two thousand years of tradition in order to build itself up, to bridge a gap, pointed arches, spray arches, two wings and a central nave – which continues in a fantastic interplay of lines and flows back into its abandoned center. The 2025 Leonce-and-Lena-Prize goes to Sandra Burkhardt for a poetological border crossing, for a spell and augur’s saying, for the wild and the sacred, grandiose erudition, sparkling humor, and the definitive answer to the question of what queer actually means. ‚The reading results are now in‘, and so the world is created, lustful, gothic, neo-neo-gothic.«
The winners:
Sandra Burkhardt (born in 1992 in Laupheim) studied art history and creative writing in Karlsruhe, Leipzig, and Berlin. In 2016, she was the winner of the poetry prize at the 24th Open Mike in Berlin. In 2018, her debut collection Wer A sagt (Whoever Says A) was published by Gutleut Verlag, in which she explores the phenomenon of ornamentation and which was featured in the poetry recommendations for the Leipzig Book Fair in 2019.In 2024, Fragments of a True Icon followed, featuring mistranslations of Francesco Petrarca’s love poems, published by kookbooks. Since 2020, she has been a member of the German-Arabic literature and translation collective Wiese (as it is) مرج.
Ana Tcheishvili (born 1993) was born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia. She studied psychology and liberal arts in Tbilisi, Berlin, and Leipzig. She writes mainly poetry in German and Georgian, publishes in German-language literary magazines and anthologies, and performs at readings, including at the 2024 Poetry Festival in Berlin. Her first collection of poems, Der Tote ist nicht von uns (The Dead Man Is Not One of Us), was published by Verlagshaus Berlin in fall 2024. She currently works as a psychologist and studies at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig.
Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (born 1989) is a political scientist, freelance author, and poet. He studied political and social sciences in Vienna, Berlin, and Cambridge. In addition to academic texts and columns, he writes essays, radio plays, prose, and poetry. In August 2022, Keskinkılıç made his debut with the poetry collection Prinzenbad, published by Elif Verlag, for which he was nominated for the Clemens-Brentano-Prize and the Dresden Poetry Prize in 2024. His poems have been translated into English, Italian, Kazakh, and Czech. In 2023, he participated in the 26th Klagenfurt Literature Course and received a scholarship from the Lower Saxony Foundation in the SchreibZeit program "Poetry in the Digital Age." Keskinkılıç performs literary performances at various festivals and cultural events. His poems are presented in art exhibitions and museum interventions, including at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, the Literaturpassage in Vienna, and most recently at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Keskinkılıç’s second poetry collection will be published by Elif Verlag in spring 2026. Prinzenbad. Poems, Elif Verlag 2022.
But let's not forget the nominees, who are:
Johanna Carl
Leo Pinke
Liv Thastum
Lilith Tiefenbacher
Read Christian Döring’s preface and the table of contents HERE – stay curious!
