I would like to nominate my dear friend, teammate, fellow German enthusiast Donut for the Friends Prize.

Me and Donut have known each other for eight years now, which shocked me when I had to look at the date of the first picture I could find of him on my phone. We met in Naples, Italy, at the start of a bachelor in literature studies; slightly older than me, he had already made an attempt somewhere else, I was fresh off high school, we found out very quickly that we shared that unique force and intensity of youth for change and managed to remain friends even when it naturally became quieter. Throughout these eight years we have managed to find each other over and over after significant fallouts, two years of lockdown, his move to the North and mine to Germany. He’s always remained not just a caring friend but also an invested reader of my work; having been a friend for so long, he's able to see my writing and through it as not many people can, and for that I was and am grateful. There is not much more one could wish from a writing friend but his attentive disposition and genuine interest.

I’m going to go into the reasons that are more explicitly collected to this website and this project in the next paragraph, but I want to insist on those three years of bachelor because, even being before the time that is the context of this nomination, they were extremely rich for both of us in a time where the line between living and writing was very thin. I began my Bachelor with a strong desire to surround myself with people that were more similar to who I wanted to become and the life I started envisioning, I was serious about literature and writing and Donut met me where I was with a desire of his own that was as powerful and all-compassing as mine. All along these first three years of our friendship we remained extraordinarily close and we watched over each other and, over late afternoon cafeteria lunches or coffees in between breaks from seminars that would always make us late and recognisable to the professors, we shared the readings that would become central to us, individually or together – Rilke, Ungaretti, Murakami, many single pages that we leafed through together. We became very enthusiastic readers of each other’s work and we began attending to what has since become the core of our friendship, a cultivation for some deeper look, for more attention, whichever way that might look like, and for its results, which not rarely made it into the page for us. He was my first writer friend, the first with whom I could really share the intensity of writing. I was much more modest at the time in sharing my work, but Donut opened the way for me by sharing some of his poems very early. I have to note that he always possessed not just a poet’s sensibility but also their ability to capture the full impact of a moment, a feeling. It was sweet in almost a nostalgic way to see that some of those original poems made the cut throughout these years to be presented on this platform.

You can imagine that I was very happy when Donut invited me to be part of the group he had put together on t2 for this contest. I’ve seen multiple people express their thanks to him for becoming a gateway into this community, for being a friend and a passionate reader, and I wholeheartedly agree with Edward Carpenter’s statement that Donut’s contributions have prioritized community-building rather than pursuing any prize himself. He has put together a great group and gone to considerable lengths to support each writer, both individually and by creating online spaces to share the journey – while facing personal health issues he always found the time to encourage me, and others, to write, to share reflections, to uplift the whole project. I am personally very grateful for the invitation because it allowed me a context in which to work on 2020-lockdown pieces that had been gathering dusts for years. Through them and with Donut’s encouragement I have gained a deeper confidence in my capacity to extend my writing outside of the stories I’ve become comfortable with. I would even say that this month of working more closely with him has also proved beneficial for our friendship, and sharing the anxiety and the adrenaline of the deadline with him over the past three Fridays has already turned into a dear memory to me. I think that most of us, me for sure, don’t want to be alone all the time while writing. Donut has done that for me. This contest has given both of us another occasion, chatting in the mornings or after work as we headed home, to think out loud about poetry, translation, the boundaries of language and experience. I genuinely believe that this experienced has strengthened our individual relationship with writing as well as our friendship. It was very sweet, too, to see him sharing poems which are of a highly personal nature, some of which I’ve after their first birth, with such a big public and receive nothing but applauses and affection.

All in all, as I worked on stories that I hadn’t touched in so long, I was led into thinking about the mindspace I wrote them originally in and how much has changed in between – and I’ve done the same about my friendship with Donut, thinking of where we met each other and how far we’ve gotten, and it has made me ever the more grateful for the time we shared and for our continued, mutual effort to keep our friendship going, even from afar. I’ve started writing letters to my friends as an act of love and this nomination, though tongue-in-cheek due to its nature, is also a context I’ve found to bring those reflections in words and share the appreciation I have for this guy. It was a pleasure to find each other in writing again after multiple moves and so many changes, after our own language has shifted into this common unknown that is English, with all that it lets be said more easily and all that resists.

For all of these reasons I recommend Donut for one of the Best Friend Prizes – for having been such a great friend outside of writing, inside of writing, before and during this contest, and for his continued, selfless effort in creating a writing community. Daje!