Vienna (OTS) – The Ö1 feature author and director Franziska Sophie Dorau will be awarded the Axel Eggebrecht Prize 2024 from the Sparkasse Leipzig Media Foundation. The prize honors a complete work in the field of radio features and is endowed with 10,000 euros. The award ceremony will take place on August 7, 2024 in Leipzig.
The Axel Eggebrecht Prize, which is awarded in memory of the radio feature pioneer of the same name, honors not an individual program, but an exceptional overall work in the field of German-language radio features. The prize has been awarded every two years since 2008 – in 2024 to Franziska Sophie Dorau. “The Austrian feature author Franziska Sophie Dorau creates her own acoustic worlds with her features and makes them tangible for the audience in an unusual way. She devotes herself to cultural and socio-political topics with meticulous research and shows us, up close and vividly, excerpts from reality – whether it is about the life and suffering of a slot machine addict or the fate of demented German-speaking seniors under the Thai sun. Her pieces demonstrate enormous passion and thoroughness, formal and linguistic precision and a clear sense of sound and rhythm. Each feature draws the audience into its own world in its own way and, at best, triggers discussions,” said the expert jury, explaining their choice.
Franziska Sophie Dorau, born in Vienna in 1979, gained her first professional experience after studying comparative literature with a focus on English and Romance languages, including as a directing and dramaturgy assistant in various theaters and as a freelance journalist. She has been working regularly for the Ö1 feature editorial team since 2010. She primarily deals with socio-political issues as well as portraits of authors and artists. In 2012, Dorau was selected for her third feature “Life’s Holiday. “On the care of European dementia patients in Thailand” was awarded the Prix Europa. Her audio picture “The Death of Soumayla Sacko – Harvesters, Trade Unionists, Africans in Italy,” produced in 2019, was nominated for the Prix Europa and the Prix Italia and was awarded the renowned CIVIS Media Prize for Integration and Cultural Diversity in Europe in the “long programs” category in 2020 ” excellent.
On the occasion of Franziska Sophie Dorau’s award, Ö1 is repeating two of her programs: On Thursday, August 15th, “Hörbilder Spezial” (10:05 a.m.) reads “The point swallows the sentence. A portrait of the South African artist William Kentridge and his father, the lawyer Sir Sydney Kentridge” on the program (co-production ORF/BR 2017). A repeat from 2022 can be heard in the “Soundtracks” (4:05 p.m.) on Tuesday, August 27th: “The magical, paper rooms of Emine Sevgi Özdamar” – a visit to the Georg Büchner Prize winner on the Turkish Cunda Island.
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