Dana Vowinckel’s novel “The World in a Ziplock Bag” is about a Jewish family whose members could hardly be more different. The parents of 15-year-old narrator Margarita are separated. She lives with her father, who is Israeli by birth and works as the cantor of a Jewish community in Berlin. Her mother, an American linguist, left her husband and small child early on because she could not abide living in Germany. Her daughter hasn’t seen her for many years. Margarita’s maternal grandparents live in Chicago. She attends a Jewish school in Berlin and spends many of her holidays with her grandparents in America, but never sees her mother. However, the summer described in the novel takes a different course: Margarita is sent to Jerusalem to stay with her mother, who has a fellowship there. Mother and daughter travel through Israel, but the conflicts escalate. Eventually, Margarita runs away and meets up with a young Israeli man whose acquaintance she had made on the plane and who had clashed with her mother due to their political differences. Worried about his daughter, Margarita’s father travels to Israel. The whole family subsequently gathers at the grandmother’s bedside in Chicago, where they work together to try and find new ways and means.

Photo: © Heike Steinweg

Dana Vowinckel was born in Berlin in 1996 to a German mother and American father. She studied linguistics and literature in Berlin, Toulouse and Cambridge. “The World in a Ziplock Bag” is her first novel. It has won multiple awards, including the 2021 Ingeborg Bachmann Competition’s Deutschlandfunk Prize, the 2023 Mara Cassens Prize for the best début novel, and the 2024 “Text & Sprache” literature prize of the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft (Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy). It was also nominated for the 2024 Leipzig Book Fair prize. In 2023, Dana Vowinckel’s story “In my Jewish Bag” was awarded first prize in the competition “L’Chaim. Writing about Jewish Life in Germany ”.

This is the 14th time that the Ravensburger Verlag Foundation has awarded the Family Novel Book Prize, which is presented annually to the author of a work of narrative prose published in the German language (novel, story, anthology, autobiography, autofictional text). The 15,000 euros in prize money goes to a writer "who uses literary stylistic devices to draw a contemporary picture of the family".

Information and contact

The event will be held in German.

Venue: Humanities Reading Room, German National Library in Leipzig

Costs: Free admission.

Duration: 90 minutes

Booking: Online via the button above or by phone +49 341 2271-286. To ensure that everything runs smoothly, registration is only possible up to 3 hours before the event. Remaining places available on site.

Cloakroom info: Please lock your bags, backpacks, jackets and coats in the lockers or leave them at the cloakroom.

Accessibility: The area in which the event will be taking place is barrier-free accessible.

Contact: veranstaltungen@dnb.de or by phone +49 341 2271-286

Address and getting here

German National Library
Deutscher Platz 1
04103 Leipzig

Getting here

We advise you to use public transport.