Auma Obama will give the lecture at the German Book Trade Peace Prize 2021 ceremony in Frankfurt, Germany on October 24, 2021. The ceremony will include the awarding of the peace prize to Tsitsi Dangarembga.
On June 21, Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga was revealed to be the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels or German Book Trade Peace Prize 2021 winner. The award, worth €25,000, is handed out annually by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, an association of German book publishers and book sellers, which runs the Frankfurt Book Fair. The prize, founded in 1950, has been awarded to among others Sebastião Salgado, Margaret Atwood, and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich.
Details of the ceremony to take place in Frankfurt have been emerging and yesterday the team organizing it announced the person to give its lecture; Auma Obama. Auma Obama is the author of the memoir And Then Life Happens (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 2013), which is translated to English by Ross Benjamin. She’s said by organizers a the Börsenverein to have been friends with Dangarembga for many years, and has been a member of the World Future Council since 2014. Auma Obama has been awarded several prizes for her social and humanitarian commitment, especially for economic, ecological, and social sustainability, including the Walter Scheel Prize and the Hans Rosenthal Prize of Honor in 2019.
The event on the 24th of October may have a restricted live audience capacity, according to what Germany’s coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic mitigation regulations are at the time. Hopefully we can get to watch the ceremony online.
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