The Elias Canetti International Society Scholarship holder for 2021. Thomas Perle won the Retzhofer Prize for Playwriting for his play Carpathian Spots. It is a family story set against the backdrop of historical and political changes in the mountainous Carpathian Mountains, northern Romania, and the familiar sounds of an almost forgotten language, zipster. It will premiere on May 7 at the Burgtheater, Vienna. Directed by Mira Stadler, it stars Elisabeth Augustin, Stephanie Dvorak and Lena Kalisz. Thomas Perle is a half-Romanian, half-Hungarian writer and playwright with German citizenship who lives and works in Vienna. He fulfilled his wish to make a drama about the lives of people in different countries along the Danube by winning the 2021 residency grant of the Elias Canetti MD and the Danube Rectors’ Conference. For a month, Thomas worked in Ruse on the texts of this part of the “donauwellen” / “Danube Waves”, which is set in Bulgaria and more specifically on the banks of the river in Ruse. In 2020. In 2020 Thomas Perle will be a guest at the International Literature Festival in Ruse with his novel “We left because everyone left”.