The Junior Nelly Sachs Prize awarded to 17-year-old Greta Maria Asgeirsdottir

On December 10 the Junior Nelly Sachs Prize was awarded for the first time. The Prize goes to 17-year-old Greta Maria Asgeirsdottir from Trollhättan and her poem Pirater (Pirates). She received the award at The Jewish Theatre exactly on the 44th anniversary of Nelly Sachs receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Greta Maria Asgeirsdottirs’ poem Pirater is published in EXPO Magazine. The winner gets a weekend trip to Nelly Sachs’ Berlin, and a unique certificate created by the cartoonist and illustrator Clara Bessijelle Johansson.

Quadrilingual Greta Maria Asgeirsdottir was born in 1993 in Hafnarfjörður in Iceland. At 9 years old the family moved to Denmark and the city Tønder of South Jutland. Here her interest in expressing feelings with words was awakened by a dedicated teacher who encouraged her writing. In 2004 Greta Maria Asgeirsdottir and her family moved to Karlstad in Sweden. Today she resides in Trollhättan, where she studies media and photography in high school. Her main recreational interests are, in addition to writing, photography and music.

”To jot down a feeling, a moment, in words, is something so… good. Or, uh, it feels so good when I feel I’ve managed to pinpoint exactly what I wanted.” writes Greta Maria Asgeirsdottir.



Pirates
by Greta Maria Asgeirsdottir
(Translated from Swedish to English by Mikael T. Zielinski)

the bench is wet but
you remain seated, stubbing out the fag and
you smile
you say you’re going to quit smoking, it’s
too cold
cold
I don’t believe you but
it’s late and
I don’t believe you but
it’s late and
I can’t bring forth any
word, so I smile and you look at
me, into me, and your eyes are
like so brown as they always
are

Photo: Linnea Frankling