The Frank Schirrmacher Prize is awarded each year for outstanding contributions to the understanding of current events. In addition, the Foundation recently started awarding the Freedom Prize of the Frank Schirrmacher Foundation at irregular intervals for enlightened awareness in dealing with our realities.

Laudatory speech for Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Alice Schwarzer
Laudatory speech for Dr Serhiy Zhadan: Anna Prizkau
Moderation: Dr Martin Meyer

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Writer, political scientist and women’s rights activist – winner of the Frank Schirrmacher Prize 2022

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. She served as a Member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006. While in Parliament, she focused on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society, and on defending the rights of Muslim women.

She has written several books including “Infidel” (2007), “Nomad: from Islam to America, a Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations” (2010), “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now” (2015) and “The Challenge of Dawa” (2017). Her new book, “Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights,” was published by Harper Collins in 2021.

Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, she was a Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard University, and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

She received her Master’s degree in Political Science from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Dr Serhiy Zhadan

Ukrainian writer – winner of the Frank Schirrmacher Foundation Freedom Award

Serhiy Viktorovych Shadan was born in 1974 in Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. In Kharkiv, Shadan studied literature, Ukrainian and German studies and earned his doctorate with a dissertation on Ukrainian futurism. Since 1991, the author of numerous volumes of poetry has been one of the defining figures of the young scene in Kharkiv, where he still lives today. His first novel, “Depeche Mode”, which was also translated into German, was published in 2007. Shadan has received numerous awards, including the Hubert Burda Prize for Young Poetry in 2006, the Swiss Literature Prize of the Jan Michalski Foundation in 2014, and the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2018. In 2022, he will receive the Freedom Prize of the German Book Trade and the Freedom Prize of the Frank Schirrmacher Foundation.