This year's Manfred Lautenschläger-Award goes to our project collaborator Sara Landa (Epochal Life Worlds: Man, Nature and Technology in Narratives of Crisis and Change). The prize, sponsored by the Manfred Lautenschläger Foundation for the Promotion of the Humanities and Cultural Studies and awarded by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, is endowed with 10,000 euros.

Sara Landa receives the award for her doctoral thesis "'The Distance Makes Them Resemble Our Things'. Approaches to Chinese Poetry in German Poetry from Expressionism to the Present." The thesis traces translational Chinese-German dialogues from Expressionism to the present. It focuses on different authors who have dealt with China, from Albert Ehrenstein and Bertolt Brecht to Jan Wagner and Herta Müller. These have dealt with traditional Chinese poets as well as the more recent poetry that reflected and accompanied the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. The study examines how potentials for aesthetic innovation emerge in the rewritings, reinterpretations, and extrapolations, and asks how the search movement via foreign literature leads back to one's own and how, as a result, the poet's standpoint could be rethought, especially in times of historical upheaval.

Sara Landa studied German Language and Literature, History, Chinese Studies, Eastern Slavistics and European Literatures and Cultures in Freiburg, Beijing and Strasbourg (EUCOR). She received her PhD from the University of Freiburg and is currently a project collaborator in the Heidelberg subproject "Epochal Life Worlds: Man, Nature and Technology in Narratives of Crisis and Change" of the Joint Center "Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China".

The laureate will present her award-winning work to the public on June 23, 2023 at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Karlstraße 4, 69117 Heidelberg) at 3 pm.