The sinking of the Titanic – described as if you were there live. The students from grades four to seven listen to author Maja Nielsen for an hour and a half. Accompanied by pictures and musical interludes, she reads from her book “Abenteuer Titanic.

On the initiative of the DSH, the author came to Egypt to awaken enthusiasm for reading among the children at our school and other German schools.

Maja Nielsen was not always an author. She trained as an actress and worked in theater until she was 30. Through the birth of her children, she discovered the joy and her talent for storytelling. Perhaps that’s why she manages to captivate her audience so well – she does more staging than simply reading aloud. She raises and lowers her voice, gets louder and quieter. You can see the Titanic’s band playing in your mind’s eye as Maja Nielsen recounts the ship’s sinking.

Life writes the most exciting stories
“I fell in love with the children here right away,” the author says after the reading. “They are so curious and open, asked very good questions. The reading was a good impulse that you now have to take and carry forward.”

The reading from the book Titanic also shows what is special about Maja Nielsen’s non-fiction stories: they are true, authentic. The author talks to contemporary witnesses, experts, scientists. For her book about the sinking of the Titanic, she spoke with oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel, the discoverer of the Titanic wreck. In Nielsen’s book, the Frenchman recounts for the first time the exciting search and the poignant moment when he found the Titanic. Life writes the most exciting stories after all. That’s where Nielsen’s passion for nonfiction comes from.

Her nonfiction books in the Abenteuer! series published by Gerstenberg Verlag have won numerous awards. The passionate storyteller Maja Nielsen also received an award as “Reading Artist of the Year.