Millennium International Essay Prize Contest Weimar

Smarter Than The Average Top Ten List

By Antoine Rocher

Berlin, 31 December 1999 - While most of the world (or the media world, at any rate) has been rounding out the millennium speculating about the Y2K bug and condensing a thousand years of human experience into top ten lists, ten rather more thoughtful responses have emerged from the International Essay Prize Contest, which asked writers to take up the millennial theme: "Liberating the Past From the Future? Liberating the Future From the Past?"

Launched in December 1997 by Weimar 1999 - Cultural Capital of Europe GmbH and the culture journal Lettre International, in cooperation with the Goethe Institute, the contest attracted 2,481 authors from 123 countries. Essays were submitted anonymously in the 6 UN languages (Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian) and German. A seperate jury for each language group selected finalists whose essays were judged by a seven-member international jury. The identity of the writers was not revealed to the judges until after the results had been announced.

Ten winners were selected overall. All winners received a scholarship to work several months in a cultural institution in Germany; the top three also received substantial cash prizes.

The first prize of 50,000DM ($26,300) was awarded to 20-year-old student Ivetta Gerasimchuk from Moscow for her 49-page essay "Dictionary of Winds."

Second prize, 30,000 DM ($15,800) was awarded to law professor Louis E. Wolcher from Seattle (USA) for his contribution "Time's Language".

The third prize, worth 20,000 DM ($10,500), was shared by the Franco-American writer Christophe Wall-Romana (USA), for his essay "Metadebt" and the writer and journalist Velimir Curgus Kazimir from Belgrade for "Houses".

Rounding out the top ten were:

5. Jean-Pierre Faye (France): "The Transparent City-state"
6. Jinmin Wang (China): "God´s Chess Game. A Weimar Essay Fable and Philosophy"
7. Xi Chuan(Pseudonym), Jun Liu (China): "Liberating the Future from Liberating the Past"
8. Mikhail N. Epstein (USA): "Tempocide. Prologue to the Resurrection of Time"
9. James Macdonald Jasper (USA): "Nostalgia: Creating a Past to Condemn the Present and Control the Future"
10.Wladimir Baranow (Russia): "Winner Takes it All!"

The German edition of Lettre International has published the ten prizewinning texts, as well as four other short-listed texts. There are plans to publish the most important essays in book form in cooperation with publishing houses from different countries.

For additional information, visit the contest website: http://www.lettre.de/lettre/39essay.htm

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