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Author, historian and manager of the Welfare Museum in Svendborg, 46-year-old Sarah Smed, received the Bent Melchior Prize 2024 on Tuesday evening.
She received the award for her many years of work to promote dialogue between vulnerable citizens and the society they are part of.
Among other things, Sarah Smed has written the book ‘Pigerne fra Sprogø’ (2024), which is about the fact that around 500 women in the period 1923-1961 were placed in the island institution because they were considered to be promiscuous and morally defective.
The evening’s awardee was also on the podium in 2019 to explain the historical investigations, when the Godhavnsdrengene received an official apology from Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S) for the state’s systematic failure.
Secretary General of Brobyggerne, the former parliament politician Özlem Cekic, justifies the choice of Sarah Smed as this year’s award recipient:
“Sarah Smed has shown tolerance, openness and curiosity towards the vulnerable citizens’ point of view and history, which at times has been painful and deeply undignified”.
“She has insisted on building the bridge between the mistakes of the time and today’s way of treating people”, says Özlem Cekic in a press release.
The Bent Melchior Prize is awarded by the association Brobyggerne, which is an association that tries to ‘strengthen dialogue and democratic conversation in Denmark’.
The former parliamentary politician Özlem Cekic founded the association with Bent Melchior in 2019.
The award is named after former chief rabbi Bent Melchior, and it ‘pays tribute to zealots who, with persistence and patience, make the effort to step out onto the bridge and meet the other’.
It is the third time that the prize has been awarded since the first in 2022.
“We often see vulnerable people as the opposite of ourselves, not as fellow human beings. Their life choices and conditions differ so much that we easily ignore them’.
“They become invisible to our gaze, even when they are right in front of us. Citizens we don’t appreciate lose their self-esteem,’ says Cekic.
She describes that the background for tonight’s award has been to turn that thinking on its head by putting people on the edge at the center and paying tribute to a firebrand who has made a difference to vulnerable people.
The price includes DKK 10,000. In addition, Sarah Smed receives the walking trophy, which is a drop-shaped statuette designed by the artist Jens Galschiøt.
Previous recipients of the award are Henrik Vestergaard Stokholm, principal at Nyborg Gymnasium and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, professor of Islamic studies.
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Source: politiken.dk
