Wunderblock

Sam Zamrik receives the Wunderblock Award 2022

Wunderblock Award Trophäe
The Wunderblock Award 2022

The Wunderblock Foundation is presenting its inaugural grant this year - the Wunderblock Award, which is endowed with 10,000 Euros.

The grant will be given to poet Sam Zamrik.

The award ceremony will take place on October 14, 2022. The laudatory speech will be delivered by poet and translator Sylvia Geist.

Sam Zamrik (b. 1996, Damascus) is a poet, translator, and political educator. They worked as a band manager and lyricist in Syria’s underground metal music movement New Wave. Their writings have been published by the WIR MACHEN DAS initiative Weiter Schreiben and in various German newspapers such as the Tagesspiegel and taz. Through their baroque, sometimes laconic images, Zamrik finds expression for war and flight, for uprootedness and loneliness, for the feeling of being non-existent and having no voice. In October of this year their first volume of poetry will be published by publishing house Hanser Berlin in a bilingual English/German edition.

Sam Zamrik lives, writes, and studies in Berlin.

Sam Zamrik Portrait
Sam Zamrik / Photo: Paula Winckler

In an expressive, luminous, intensely tender language that is able to take the risk of beauty because allowing us to see when and how, even in times of great trouble, beauty can arise, Sam Zamrik’s poems sing their "yet." – From Sylvia Geist's laudatio

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Kristin Rieber
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