Hanna Végh has won the Gerrit Krol Award 2023!

The third edition of the Gerrit Krol Award has been won by Hanna Végh with her essay Taal als breekijzer (language as a crowbar). As a reward she will receive a monetary prize of €2,000 and her essay will be published on the literary blog Tzum. The jury considers her essay captivating, directional, and very convincing.

Essay competition to stimulate Academic Dutch

Yesterday, Hanna Végh was named the winner during the award ceremony at the UG Academy Building. The Gerrit Krol Award is an essay competition held every two years, which was brought to life in order to raise awareness about the preservation of Academic Dutch as the main language for universities and universities of applied sciences in Dutch-speaking regions. The Dutch Language and Culture degree programme and the Language Centre at the University of Groningen invited students from all universities to submit an essay in Dutch of up to 2,000 words. The jury chose three nominees from the submissions: Tobias Postma, Emke Sijtsma, and Hanna Végh.

Praise from the judges

The jury, which consisted of Mathijs Deen (writer), Ellen Krol (Gerrit Krol's daughter), and Ronald Ohlsen (Dutch teacher at the Language Centre), agreed on one thing: it was a great pleasure to read the submitted pieces. They showed thinking powers and creativity, and in many cases the joy of writing burst out of the pages. In the essays written by the nominees, everything came together: an original elaboration of the theme, a pleasant structure, a beautiful style, and a surprising choice of words.

Hanna Végh wrote the essay in which language turns out to be a crowbar, meaning a powerful tool, in the foreign-language world one enters when moving from one country to another. Hanna is from Hungary and is studying Dutch at the RUG this year through an exchange programme. This summer she will return to Budapest to complete her bachelor's degree at the Department of Dutch Studies at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), but she definitely wants to do her master's in the Netherlands. 'When I first came to the Netherlands, I just fell in love with the language and the country. I love writing and especially writing in Dutch,' says Hanna.

She had to look up the word ‘crowbar’ (in Dutch: breekijzer, often used figuratively to signify a powerful tool) before committing herself to writing the essay. When she discovered its meaning, she found that she was able to put it to use very well. She describes how the crowbar of language gave her the freedom to explore the world. By acquiring language, the writer acquires a world. You can soon read the essay on the literary blog Tzum.

Collection of poems 3 4 5

In honour of the award ceremony, Ellen Krol presented the recently released collection of poems 3 4 5 in a beautiful animation video. The collection of poems contains illustrations by Ellen Krol and three poems by Gerrit Krol. ‘Over time, I created an animation for each of the poems. In doing so, I consciously used a simple technique, a collage of textiles, to fit the form of the poems. It has now been 10 years since my father passed away. The animations are complete but, you will see, we wanted to commemorate him and his unique creations in three, four, five letters through this collection,’ says Ellen Krol.