Laureate 2023: Maryam Goudarzi (Hamburg)

Migration" project

This year, for the third time, a one-month scholarship for literary research will be awarded at the Gotha Research Library, endowed with 1,500 euros. The jury has chosen the exiled author Maryam Goudarzi, who lives in Hamburg. She was born in Iran in 1980; after studying Persian literature in Tehran, she began working as a freelance author and journalist. Her first novel "Between Two Mirrors" was banned from publication by the Iranian Ministry of Culture. Since then, her freelance work became increasingly difficult. In 2021, she finally emigrated to Germany; today she lives in Hamburg. For her current novel project, which is dedicated to the topic of "migration" from the perspective of different ethnicities and nationalities, the author would like to study the holdings of the emigrant letter collection in Gotha in order to also include the migration of past centuries in her project.

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