Library Scholarship For Authors 2024 Advertised

Libraries not only preserve literature – libraries can also inspire literature. The research grant, which is awarded in cooperation with the "Friends of the Gotha Research Library e.V.", the Gotha Research Centre and the "Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V.", is aimed at authors of all literary genres who wish to engage with the holdings of the Gotha Research Library during the research phase of their literary projects.

The Gotha Research Library at Friedenstein Castle
... is one of the most important historical libraries in the German-speaking world. It is part of the collections of the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, which existed from 1640 to 1825, and the collections of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which were collected in Gotha between 1826 and 1945. Together with the museum collections, the Secret Archives, the Ducal Museum and the former ducal apartments as well as the park landscape, it forms a unique ensemble of collections, buildings and gardens of European standing. The Gotha Research Library preserves more than 700,000 printed works, including around 350,000 prints from the 16th to 19th centuries. There are also around 11,500 manuscripts. The core of its universally orientated holdings up to around 1850 is the outstanding collection of manuscripts, autographs and bequests on the cultural history of Protestantism in the early modern period. The collection of around 3,500 oriental manuscripts is one of the largest of its kind in Germany. The Gotha Perthes Collection preserved in the research library comprises unique source material on the development of cartography and geography in the 19th and 20th centuries. The library also holds an important collection of letters from German emigrants to America from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The rich holdings of travel literature, the estate of the science fiction author Kurd Laßwitz and the area of the Illuminati Order, which has been intensively researched in Gotha, are also suitable for literary discoveries. In addition to current literature from the Gotha Research Library, users have access to more than one million monographs and journals as well as databases and electronic media from the Erfurt University Library in Gotha.

Details on the scholarship and the application process can be found on the Cultural Foundation's website.