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Louth writer short listed for EU Prize (16th March, 2010)

March 16, 2010 at 12:53 pm Leave a comment

John Holten and Line Madsen Simenstad, Co-editors of the book You Are Here

A young writer from Louth is among the finalists competing for a prestigious European award with a book he compiled while living in Berlin. Ardee-native John Holten (26) has been selected as the Irish entry for the Charlemagne European Youth Prize for his book entitled You Are Here, a collection of short stories and essays by young people living in a country not their own.
Speaking from Berlin where he’s been based since 2008, John Holten said the project represents a pluralistic attempt to portray the European experience of migration by people from a range of different backgrounds and countries.
‘The book is a mix of genres and nationalities; 14 people were involved in writing and designing, including a dramatist, a poet, a sociologist, a political scientist and a visual artist, and there are five different languages used with English as the backbone,’ he said.
Another common thread is that all of the contributors were born in the 1980s, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Holten describes them as ‘a generation come of age in post-Wall Europe (…) who no longer feel obligated to answer the national questions, but instead answer their unique personal experience, one of borderless work and travel, mediated by translation and the internet’.
Irish MEPs Nessa Childers and Gay Mitchell, who were part of the Irish jury, praised the concept of the book and said ‘to understand Berlin is to understand the European Union project’.
John and his Norwegian co-editor Line Madsen Simenstad will join the winning projects from 26 other EU member states at an award ceremony in Aachen, Germany, in May. Three overall winners will be chosen and will receive funding of between €2,000 and €5,000. John Holten’s book You Are Here is for sale online at www.brokendimanche.eu/youarehere

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