Welcome to the website of the Heidelberger Autor:innenpreis. Here you will find everything you need to know about the prize, this year's competition and the jury.
Aaron Mayer wins Heidelberger Autor:innenpreis 2025
This year's Heidelberger Autor:innenpreis goes to Aaron Mayer! For the eighth time, the Heidelberg Author Award honors outstanding achievements by authors from the UNESCO City of Literature Heidelberg and its surroundings. This year, for the first time, the award was also open to authors from the UNESCO Cities of Literature Bremen, Nottingham, and Dunedin. At the award ceremony in the City Library on November 13 at 7 p.m., Aaron Mayer will present his three submitted poems.
Shortlistreading 2025
As part of the 11th Heidelberg Literaturherbst, the shortlist reading for the 8th Heidelberg Authors' Prize took place on September 21, 2025, at 5:00 p.m.
The 2025 shortlist has been selected!
For the eighth time, the Heidelberger Autor:innenpreis (Heidelberg Author Award) awards outstanding literary contributions. This year, in addition to texts from the UNESCO City of Literature Heidelberg and its surroundings as well as Mannheim, works from other selected UNESCO Literary Cities were also accepted. The genre this year was poetry. Out of a total of 117 submissions, 6 were selected, each consisting of three poems, which form the short list.
Congratulations to:
Alexis Florentina
Mina Herz
Manon Hopf
Marie Loewe
Aaron Mayer
Mariam Rietveld
Call for Submissions 2025
Genre: Poetry
Topic: freely selectable
Language: English or German
Deadline: 1 May 2025
Length: 3 poems (max. 1,500 characters per poem incl. spaces)
People from: Heidelberg, Mannheim, the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, Bremen, Nottingham (UK) and Dunedin (NZ)
It's that time again! We are hereby announcing the 8th Heidelberg Author Award 2025, this year for poetry. All persons living, studying or working in Heidelberg, Mannheim, the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis, Bremen, Nottingham (UK) and Dunedin (NZ) are welcome to submit their poems for the competition.
We look forward to your submissions!
Voting the genre for 2025
There were 112 votes...
3rd place: One-act plays (23.2%)
2nd place: Fairy tales (25%)
1st place: Poetry (47.3%)
The call for entries will follow soon.
