Friederike Danebrock’s Thesis on Frankenstein bags the drupa Prize

Award comes with a prize money of Euro 6,000

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IPP Desk
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drupa Prize winner
drupa Prize winner Friederike Danebrock together with Wolfram N. Diener, President & CEO of Messe Düsseldorf and Erhard Wienkamp, Managing Director of Messe Düsseldorf. ©Hojabr Riahi

Germany’s Friederike Danebrock has been awarded the drupa Prize 2022 for her thesis ‘Frankenstein. On Making Fiction’.

The award, that comes with a prize money of Euro 6,000, was presented by Wolfram N. Diener, president and CEO of Messe Düsseldorf, Erhard Wienkamp, managing director at Messe Düsseldorf, and Prof. Anja Steinbeck, rector of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, at Messe Düsseldorf on 29 August 2022. 

drupa supports outstanding young scientists from the Faculty of Philosophy at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf with this award every year.  

Andreas Pleßke, CEO of Koenig & Bauer AG and Chairman of the drupa committee, said n a personal video message: “I congratulate Friederike Danebrock cordially on receiving the drupa Prize 2022 and endorse this excellent decision. I am very happy that drupa also extends its activities beyond the print industry by promoting special talents of the Faculty of Philosophy with our Prize.”

Friederike Danebrock’s thesis, which was awarded “summa cum laude” and supervised by Prof. Dr. Roger Lüdeke as her doctoral supervisor, is dedicated to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and selected adaptations. 

The world-famous story of the young Swiss man Viktor Frankenstein, who creates an artificial human being, is one of the best-known examples of the horror genre influencing literature and popular culture alike.

Friederike Danebrock starts from the observation that the “Frankenstein complex” – the collection of adaptations and rewritings grouped around Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein – is characterized by a remarkable coincidence of theme and practice: we are dealing with a story about reproduction that is itself extraordinarily reproductive. The central character – the monster – and the story in which it appears are subject to the same existential process.  

Her award-winning work is convincing because of its very innovative approach to cultural theory developing a theory of aesthetic fiction by incorporating different disciplinary approaches, stated the Faculty of Philosophy at Heinrich Heine University explaining the reasoning for her nomination for the drupa Prize. 

Danebrock was born in Cologne in 1985. After business management training in a publishing house, she studied German Language and Literature and English at the University of Cologne from 2008. 

Ever since 1978, Messe Düsseldorf has awarded the drupa Prize, which comes with Euro 6,000 prize money, for an outstanding thesis written in the Faculty of Philosophy of Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. The prize money is used for the publication and dissemination of award-winning work in the humanities. The drupa Prize is awarded by a panel of experts comprising the Rectorate and Vice Rectorate of Heinrich Heine University (HHU) Düsseldorf, the Chairman of the drupa Committee and the CEO of Messe Düsseldorf.

The next drupa will be held at the Düsseldorf Exhibition Centre from 28 May to 7 June 2024. 

2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India

Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.

The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry. While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.

The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.

Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.

Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.

Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.

– Naresh Khanna

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