Kölner Förderpreis für junge Literatur

Renate Hanekamp, born in 1952, has lived in Cologne since 1976. She has been working as a tax consultant since 1977 and has mainly looked after people from the cultural and music industry. Her private interest lies in art and culture, especially literature. Her interest in the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker has resulted in a text collage that has been performed several times as a reading. Publication as a book is planned. She is currently working on her first novel.

Jennifer Segebrecht (*1991) lives in Cologne. She writes on Instagram, for artists and publishes in magazines. After her studies and longer stays in London and San Francisco, she began working as a business psychologist. She was a scholarship holder of the "1:1" mentoring program for NRW writers in 2020/21 and is working on her first novel. Labels was recently published in DAS GRAMM.

Lisa Tracy Michalik is an author and co-founder and editor of defrag zine. She sees her writing as decidedly queer and situated in an Afro-diasporic tradition. She writes prose, poetry, experimental text formats and screenplays. She recently read at She Said and is part of the Writers Room of the series "Schwarze Früchte" by Lamin Leroy Gibba, which has been running in the ARD Mediathek since October. Her texts can be found in Parabolis Virtualis 3 (Querverlag) and Sisters and Souls 2 (Orlanda Verlag), among others. She is currently writing her debut novel.

paula van well writes prose and drama and is studying for a master's degree at the Institute for Language Arts in Vienna. She has accompanied productions at theaters and in the independent scene and published in various anthologies and literary magazines (most recently Das Narr, Bella Triste). Currently paula is working on her first novel, the project is supported by the START scholarship of the Austrian Federal Government, among others. Since 2022, paula has been working closely with composer Laris Bäucker, the joint radio play szenen einer zersetzung was broadcast on DLF Kultur, an excerpt received the special prize of the schule für dichtung wien. 2024 paula is co-editor of the literary magazine JENNY, shortlisted for the WORTMELDUNGEN-Förderpreis and lives in Vienna.

The Cologne Prize for Young Literature is organized together with the VHS Cologne and supported by the Viktor Rolff Foundation. Thank you very much!