Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 round of the Lidl Year Abroad Project Prizes. The scheme supports creative, cultural, and research-based projects developed during students’ year abroad, encouraging them to engage with the languages, histories, and communities they encounter. As in previous years, the prize winners represent a remarkable range of interests, from literary translation and illustration to community engagement, historical research, creative writing, and musical heritage.
A particularly striking project this year is Emily Dicker’s artwork inspired by Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten texts. While studying in Bamberg, Emily designed the cover and a series of illustrations for Fragmented: A New Translation of Selected Unfinished Todesarten Texts, working closely with editor Isabel Parkinson and the student translation team. Drawing on Bachmann’s themes, imagery, and narrative style, she created an evocative visual world that accompanies the new translation and demonstrates the creative possibilities that emerge when literary scholarship and artistic practice meet.
*The 2026 prize-winning projects are:*
Emily Dicker (The Queen’s College): Illustrating Ingeborg Bachmann: Visualising the Todesarten Project
Emily developed the cover design and interior illustrations for Fragmented: A New Translation of Selected Unfinished Todesarten Texts. Working from Bachmann’s unfinished prose and in dialogue with student translators, she created a series of original artworks that explore fragmentation, memory, time, and identity through visual form. The volume will launch on 25 of June 2026, the day Ingeborg Bachmann would have turned 100.
Clara Price (St Anne’s College): Ein fremdes Land
Drawing on encounters with strangers during her year abroad in Braunschweig, Clara is developing a bilingual creative writing project that combines short stories, journal entries, and reflections on community, anonymity, and belonging. The project explores how unfamiliar places become home and how everyday conversations can transform a foreign city into a network of human connections.
Polly O’Sullivan (St Hilda’s College): Town Twinning in the Age of Brexit
Inspired by her participation in an exchange programme between Warwick and Verden, Polly will investigate the continuing significance of town twinning for UK–German relations. Through interviews with participants, local officials, and community members, as well as translation and outreach work, the project examines how international exchanges shape perceptions, careers, and local communities.
Tilly Borthwick (New College): A Novel of Jena Romanticism
Tilly is writing a historical fantasy novel set in early nineteenth-century Jena. Inspired by Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels and the intellectual networks of German Romanticism, the project follows a group of young women researchers whose literary explorations uncover unexpected forms of magic. A research trip to Jena will help bring the city and its history to life within the novel.
Joseph Walford (St Edmund Hall): Kurrentschrift and the German Diaspora in Pennsylvania
Joseph will travel to the Historic Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania to assist with the transcription and translation of an eighteenth-century theological manuscript written in Kurrentschrift. Alongside this scholarly work, he plans a creative project documenting the experience through handwritten journals and artistic responses inspired by Pennsylvania Dutch history and language.
The Faculty looks forward to publishing Emily Dicker's volume later this month and following the progress of the other projects over the summer or the coming year and to sharing the students’ reports, creative work, and discoveries as they develop. Together, they demonstrate the breadth of intellectual curiosity and creativity fostered by the Year Abroad experience.
Call for submissions: https://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/news/2026/06/03/lidl-year-abroad-project-prizes