Carl Louis in Nordic Speech Festival 2025
What does it take to write an excellent speech? Ask Carl Louis from 1i! He, along with the rest of his classmates, has spent the last few weeks learning about speechwriting, famous speeches and rhetorics in Danish class. At the end the unit, everyone wrote a speech and sent it off to the Nordic Speech Festival competition. To Carl Louis’ big surprise, his speech was chosen as one of the 20 best (out of 800!) speeches from young people all over Denmark.
Carl Louis’ speech was chosen because of it’s powerful rhetorical devices and the highly topical theme: male fertility (and infertility) and the subsequent societal implications. When asked why he chose this theme Carl Louis says:
”I wrote about something that I myself think a lot about, but which can be quite difficult to talk about with others. My speech is about what sorts of things you should consider even now, if you want to have children in the future. It is a really important subject.”
This is Carl Louis’ first ever speech, and thus it was a huge surprise for him to learn, that his speech had made the cut and made it through the first round of the competition: “I was very surprised. I hadn’t even considered that my speech would be good enough for something like this.” A speech is unique and very different from an opinion letter, says Carl Louis, because “a speech lifts the words off the page somehow. People listen more to what you have to say, when you hear the words instead of just reading them”.
Along with having his speech enter the next part of the competition, Carl Louis also attended a speechwriting workshop. Apart from learning how to make their speeches even better, attendees at the workshop also received tips on how to deliver a great speech. Carl Louis looks forward to participating in the national Speech Festival and maybe even making it all the way to the final Nordic Speech Festival in April in Uppsala, Sweden. Time will tell whether Carl Louis will continue to write speeches. For now, he is just excited to see how far his speech will go. One thing is certain though: Carl Louis, along with the rest of the participants, a part of a great initiative that places young people, their voices and opinions in the spotlight.
A huge congratulations to Carl Louis and good luck with the rest of the competition! If you want to read Carl Louis’ speech, you can do so here (the speech is written in Danish). [https://www.talefest.nu]
All students who have participated in the speech festival program beforehand can submit their speeches and compete for a chance to be selected to participate in the national speech festivals. If they advance, they will have the opportunity to take part in the grand final event in Uppsala in April.
Nordic Speech Festival is a new one-day festival that provides young people from the Nordic countries with a platform to speak about the issues that matter to them and that they are passionate about. The festival celebrates the spoken word and serves as a meeting point for young people from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The Speech Festival is part of “The Nordics and the World – Rhetorical Citizenship Past, Present, and Future,” a project led by the organization Danske Taler with support from the AP Foundation.