The winner of the 2022 Youth Book Prize
Paula Anouk Wenkel introduces herself:
I'm Paula, a girl who gets a taste of a book when she holds it in her hands. I love books more than anything, I write and read and read and write. I love cities. It fulfills me to watch people and events at train stations, in parks or in cafés when I leave the idyllic village where I live with my family.
When I was little, I always wanted to know how to write things down. What are words and sentences, how do you decipher books? These are all questions that I was already asking myself at the age of five. In an averted form, of course, but they were there nonetheless. I always wanted to know what these magical signs were all about. I scribbled blocks full of characters that were illegible to others and told my first stories that only I could read.
Shortly before I started school, I was already running around our garden with a pink, fluffy notebook and pestering my mom with questions about different words. These were my first steps towards writing. In primary school, an imaginative story became my own little booklet with my own drawings.
Many times - even before I knew about this writing competition - I imagined a book of mine being in the stores, people taking it off the shelves and being so excited by the blurb that they want to read it. I wanted and still want to inspire people with what I've written, and now there's even a chance of that actually happening. But really, I write because it's a part of my life that makes me feel complete.
I've often had ideas and scenes in my head and was initially completely enthusiastic about them until I realized from time to time that they weren't suitable for me to write after all. At first it was just fan fiction for "Harry Potter" and "The Wild Bunch" because I didn't want the stories to end.
The idea for "Shadow days of love" came to me in a dream - a break-in, a chase, everything so crazy! I couldn't help but remember the dream. I thought about it for several days until I grabbed the whole thing by the scruff of the neck. With rough ideas and no real plot, I sat down to write. It took me ages to write the first few chapters until I knew what Victoria wanted to tell me and the readers. From then on, everything was easy. The words just flowed out of my fingers and the feeling of having found something that made me happy was fantastic. A story in which young people stick together in dangerous situations, no matter how forbidden it is and what consequences follow. A community with love, friendship and trust. I think this is more important than ever, especially in this day and age - it helps and gives strength.
Your Paula Anouk Wenkel (P.A.W.)
The 2020 Youth Book Prize winner
Madleine Smykalla introduces herself:
"Hello, my name is Madleine Smykalla, I'm 11 years old and I only write stories here. That's why it's called 'little story'. I hope you enjoy reading them, dear reader."
This is how I introduced myself in my first 'little story', six years ago. It's a green book decorated with purple blobs, washi tape and stickers. That was the first time I started writing stories seriously. I have written a total of three of these 'little stories'. 
Now I'm 17 years old and I like to spend my time writing stories, reading, watching movies, playing the guitar, violin or volleyball and painting. actually, I've always made up stories and made it 'official' at 11. However, most of my stories are not written down. I used to share a room with my sister and tell her various stories to put her to sleep, which usually meant that we stayed awake longer instead of falling asleep faster. They were about unicorns, racing cyclists or 'Everything Land', in which my sister and I were the main characters and traveled to a new fantasy place every day and met new people. When I was too tired, we would remember where we left off and I would continue my story the next night. At vacation camp, I told my friends scary stories in the tent in the evening, but they were usually so scary that I had to tell them about marshmallows and unicorns again so that we could fall asleep.
And when I wrote down my stories, it was always something very special. Once I even wrote one in a DIN A4 notebook and pretended it was a book.
I drew pictures for each story so that my 'readers' could better imagine my dream worlds, and sometimes I also drew comics.
I've always enjoyed pretending that the reader is in the middle of the action. I love to show others my dreams and take them into their imagination for a little while. I wrote stories like 'The Fairy Tale Protectors' or stories about Conni so that I could have more of my heroes, or to make movies and fairy tales more beautiful than they actually are.
Many notebooks that were supposed to be diaries ended up as free space for new adventures.
When I first read Harry Potter, I started to fall in love with the fantasy genre and found the idea for my best play yet, 'Vespia & Aurora - Sisters of Glittering Power'.
Fantasy gives you the opportunity to escape from everyday life. Especially in times like these, it's nice to be able to dream away and leave reality behind. You can dream up a beautiful new world and characters that you instantly fall in love with. I came up with the idea for my book in summer 2019 after I had finished writing my last big project, 'An unforgettable summer' (my cousins, sister and I even shot a trailer for it because we really wanted it to be made into a movie).
I wanted to write something completely new and move from the pen to the computer. It was going to be a fantasy story about fairies and magic. My first idea, however, came from my Latin homework when I came across the word 'nigromantia magic'. From then on, I knew that this word had to have something to do with my story.
I wrote a rough script and began to build up my story bit by bit. I often deviated from my original plan and changed a lot. I added some things and took some things out until, nine months later, I was sure that 100% was the perfect story.
What is important to me about my book is that it shows how bad selfishness can be, which comes to the fore in the villain 'Miss Maunz'. I also want it to convey that you should stand up for what seems right to you, regardless of what everyone else thinks. My book is also there to make it clear that family and love are the most beautiful and important things in life.
My biggest dream is to one day hold my own book in my hands that will not only inspire my friends and myself, but also people everywhere. It would be incredible if not only my story was published, but it also included my own cover. I've been working on illustrations for my book for a while now, drawing the places as I imagine them. How nice would it be to see my own drawings on a book cover?
I sometimes imagine people strolling past a small bookshop and saying: "Wow, that book looks interesting."
It's so nice when I can put a smile on other people's faces and they can't stop reading. Because that's what I hope my story will do.
Thank you for this opportunity!
Madleine Smykalla
The winner of the 2019 Youth Book Prize
Elena Fankhauser introduces herself:
"A girl with green-blue eyes, red cheeks, dark blonde hair and freckles; that's what I was and still am today. I live in a village in Switzerland and ride my bike from there to school every day at a language high school in the nearest town.
I am an absolute fan of books. I love immersing myself in other worlds, so it's no surprise that I love movies just as much. Snuggling up in a blanket with these two activities makes me thoroughly happy. However, sport and music are much more important to me: I dance hip-hop and rock'n'roll, play the piano passionately and go to a soccer club. Music in particular inspires me to do many things, including writing. But how did I actually get into writing?
It all started with reading; as soon as I learned to decipher the letters, words and sentences, I devoured book after book with enthusiasm. After that it went pretty quickly - I created my own stories, usually drew pictures to go with them and later, when I was nine, my first 'real' booklet was created. It was 33 pages long and was a mixture of everything I had read in the fantasy genre. After this story, it became a habit for me to write down all the ideas that popped into my head.
The idea for "Tears of Hope" first popped into my head when I was ten. Initially, my basic structure resembled a series I had watched. Over time, I deviated from it, came up with new ideas and turned everything upside down until hardly a shred of the series remained. Then I started typing away, but without any idea how the story with Jane would end. At eleven, my writing phases were very irregular, at twelve I wrote a lot more. But then, shortly before moving on to sixth form, I threw everything overboard - I deleted at least 80 A-4 pages, nothing seemed original to me.
Fortunately, I got new inspiration from vacations, music and nature, but the particularly good ideas came to me at night. It's still like that today: when I need a good idea, all I have to do is lie awake at night and imagine various scenes. Unfortunately, I get a lot of sleep deprivation as a result, which means that I digress even more often at school. But just between you and me... I'm really happy to put up with that for the good ideas! 😉
So when I started high school, I started all over again - this time with a detailed red thread. It took seven months until I wrote the last sentence of the first part on May 1, 2017. Little did I know at the time that I still had six months of revision ahead of me. Towards the end of November, I applied for the Youth Book of the Year 2018. Today, I am very happy not to have been selected, for two reasons: The criticism from the German Literature Society that I should give all the characters more depth helped me improve my book a lot, and during the 2018 spring break, an ultimate idea came to me out of nowhere...
I incorporated this idea into the story, which unfortunately took several months, and assigned each person a CV and character description. After this revision, I wrote synopses and reading samples, and at the same time I submitted my book for the 2019 young adult book competition without getting my hopes up again. Before I got around to sending submissions to other publishers, I got some amazing news about the competition... My biggest dream of being able to share my story with others has come true and I still can't believe it!"
Nicole Allwang - winner of the 2018 Youth Book Prize
An author introduces herself!
I was the little redhead who wanted to know everything in detail and never ran out of questions, who grew up in the countryside in a small village in the Upper Palatinate and still ate dirt, like many of my kindergarten friends.
But as wild as I was back then - you wouldn't believe it - I could hardly wait to get to school. And for one reason only: to learn to read. Numbers and arithmetic and all that didn't appeal to me back then - and still doesn't today. but I really wanted to be able to read these mysterious letters.
However, as I was a very impatient person and always wanted everything immediately (this is still the case today), I started to draw my own stories. My mother then had to write the text, which I dictated to her.
From then on, it was clear to me that I would write a book one day and my mother knew that she was dealing with a particularly difficult case with me.
However, it took me until I was 14 to finish the book. That was when I fell victim to the Epp-Stein-Barr virus and was therefore not allowed to leave the house for several weeks. So that's how my first book came about - out of sheer boredom, to put it correctly.
Now I'm 16 years old and I'm still trying to be perfect in my own way. I love the smell of new booksthe smell when it has rained, and I can't live without eating at least one apple a day. I go to an arts high school and have been playing the trumpet and piano for ages.
Basically, I didn't trust myself that I would really manage to finish this book. Let alone start it at all, because when I started reading Winter, I really only had the name "Winter" in my head.
I didn't know who Winter was or what she was all about. In fact, I don't think I even knew how I knew this name or how I came up with it. Anyway, I started to think about who Winter might be, what she might look like and what her character was like. But as much as I tried to plan my book, it didn't really work. That's probably one of the reasons why I finally just started typing - with two fingers.
Of course, I had other things on my mind: for example, there was a brief discussion that Winter could also be face-blind, but I quickly dismissed that. By this point, I was on page 8 of my book (still from Winter's point of view at the time). But when I finally knew what Winter's secret was, I immediately deleted everything I had up to that point and started again. This time, however, from nobody's point of view.
And then, yes, when I got to page eight, I stopped again, slammed the laptop shut and stopped writing for a whole week because I had no idea who I had ended up with. Was it a neutral person? Was it a boy? Was it a girl?
So after a whole week of thinking, I opened the laptop again, looked at it skeptically and re-read everything I had written so far. That's when I realized that I definitely needed a narrator. A role that I could slip into: And that's when Clyde was born.
So I decided to start with a neutral person (Laika) and then later have the real narrator: Clyde - or Milo, as he was called at the time (I didn't name him Clyde until much later). Milo was just an interim solution). And then I wrote. Wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Soon I could write with ten fingers and suddenly I was finished. I remember it very clearly: it was about two o'clock in the morning when I typed the last word.
All in all, it took me almost a year to write this book, to invent this story. It took me an endless amount of nerves, almost sparked a full-blown family war a few times (because we only have one laptop), but it was also a lot of fun pulling Clyde out of trouble all the time. It was also almost funny again to see my brother rattling his sabres for days on end because I was occupying the laptop.
By the way, I still don't have a laptop and still write everything on the family box. My parents have already asked me if I wanted my own, but they gave me a choice: Either a laptop ... or a new trumpet.
What can I say ... it has become the trumpet.
Oh yes, and most of the best ideas for this book actually came to me in the shower.
"A year is quite a long time. An awful lot can happen in three hundred and sixty days. Some things have changed in my environment, but have I actually changed myself?
I will start at the very beginning of the change and at the very beginning of the one year between now and then.
The inspiration for "Behind the Mirror - Deadly Thorns" came much more suddenly than that for part two. I've often answered the question of what inspired me to write "Behind the Mirror - Deadly Thorns". But never the question of general inspiration. I'm a person who draws a lot of inspiration from my own experiences and images.
Sometimes something happens to me or I catch something and I have to write it down. It's different with pictures. If I find an image somewhere that I like, then my subconscious begins to transform the image into an action so that it actually takes me further.
So I get my inspiration from quite a few sources in everyday life and friends and relatives also inspire me.
Within a year, I've also met new people and some people actually through my debut novel. I got to know very nice and creative people via Instagram or similar social networks who are just as enthusiastic about writing as I am. I also got to know some bloggers who enchant me with their writing.
My old and new friends always have my back and I know that I can always rely on them - even if my own friends treated me differently, especially at the beginning.
I often got incredulous looks or questions like: "Oh really?", and then a raised eyebrow, which I would have liked to erase from most people's faces after a few weeks. Others, on the other hand, were suddenly much nicer to me.
Now, almost a year later, after I published part one, it has all died down and most of them are back to the way they were a year ago.
But the question was whether I have changed. My everyday life has definitely changed to a certain extent. I don't have a strict schedule that I have to stick to, let alone properly planned writing times. Of course, I occasionally schedule a few hours where I just sit down and start writing. But especially the time I spend planning and writing notes has definitely taken over and takes up a lot more of my free time than it did a year ago.
The fact that my everyday life has changed has also changed my life from the ground up. A year ago, I would never have thought that I would meet so many great people through my book, that people would actually come to visit me at the book fair, or that a number of people would cheer on everything I do for the book.
So to answer the question of whether I myself have changed: Yes. Yes, I have changed. Not significantly, but definitely noticeably.
Of course, everything that happens around me leaves its mark, whether positive or negative ... But publishing my first book has made me much more determined and ambitious, although certainly also a lot more stubborn.
Writing is my world and I wouldn't trade the past year for anything in the world."
