In September 2019, Salwa Benaissa (the NE), a marketing copywriting living in Prague, embarked on her six-month Erasmsu for Young Entrepreneur exchange and went to spend six months as the entrepreneurial mentee of Victoria Gosling (the HE), founding director of the organization The Reader Berlin in Germany.
Together, Victoria and Salwa ran the day-to-day activities of the Reader Berlin along with the third colleague, Traci Kim, the event program manager. As part of her daily tasks, Salwa took on most of the administrative duties including updating the Reader’s website content, fielding emails,coordinating courses and events organized by The Reader, operational support at public events and workshops, writing the bi-weekly newsletter, and social media marketing.
Aside from daily office duties, the main project that Salwa was assigned to see from start to finish the duration of the six months was the production and publication of the collected 2019 Berlin Writing Prize winning entries, titled The Circus. It is the fourth such anthology published by The Reader since the establishment of the prize in 2013.

The first part of September 2019 was dedicated mainly to Salwa’s training and becoming acquainted with the Reader’s wide network of institutional and professional contacts in Berlin. Towards the end of the month and throughout October, Salwa worked very closely with Victoria to plan the judging dinner for the 2019 Berlin Writing Prize, which saw judges from various parts of the world convene at the restaurant Einstein Unter Den Linden (one of the prize’s sponsors) in the city centre of Berlin on November 30th, to discuss and agree on the shortlist of 10 winners. 

On December 1st, as soon as the winners were announced to the public, the production process for the 2019 Berlin Writing Prize anthology started. Salwa’s primary task was to co-edit, reformat, and proofread each of the shortlisted entries, coordinate between the winning authors and the publisher KLAK Verlag, and to support all related administrative duties on behalf of the Reader Berlin.
Throughout this time, she promoted and handled the PR of the forthcoming book launch as well. By the end of December, the anthology was fully collected and sent to print just before Christmas.
After the new year, the focus shifted to the preparation of The Circus launch party, which also marked the 2019 Berlin Writing Prize-giving ceremony, and took place at the venue Lettrétage on 31st January 2020. This presented the first public launch of the book and involved performative readings by the winning authors, some of whom came all the way from Australia, the UK and beyond to attend the event, which Salwa also helped to coordinate.
To wind down the final month of February, Salwa and Victoria continued to focus on coming up with promotional ways to help The Reader’s co-publisher KLAK Verlag to sell the book and create advertising materials around it, including a special ‘giveaway’ promotion on social media and some other content-related strategies. Salwa finished off her final week preparing the hand-over materials for the next assistant, Dayna, who would be coming from Hungary for a Young Entrepreneurship Exchange starting in March.
Throughout the six-month placement, Victoria Gosling also regularly mentored Salwa on her hybrid small-press idea, Project Plume, which she has already begun to build and share online, and introduced her to various contacts who have since collaborated with her on her project. Salwa is set on continuing to develop the project and to maintain a strong collaborative link with both The Reader and the city of Berlin.