ADONIS

Adonis is the most important poet in the Arab world. Born Ali Ahmed Said Esber in Syria in 1930, he studied philosophy in Damascus and has held professorships at several universities.
The oldest of six children, he grew up in a poor village near the city of Latakia in the coastal mountains of northern Syria. His father, a farmer and the village’s Alawite imam, gave his son a traditional Arab Islamic education – reading the Koran and reciting religious poems. Adonis studied German and French philosophy at the University of Damascus.
This writer’s work is very much determined by his life. He lived through his country’s progression to independence, organizing demonstrations against the French armed forces stationed in Syria. He spent eleven months in jail for his political activities during his military service from 1954 to 1956. In 1956 he moved to the more liberal Beirut, where he worked as a teacher, journalist, and literary critic. Adonis introduced the Arab world to modern poetry in the magazine Shir. He left Beirut for Paris in 1986 for reasons of security he. For decades he represented the poetic avant-garde not only in Syria, but in the entire Arab-speaking world.
Until his retirement, Adonis taught Arab poetry at the Collège de France. “I am one of those who seek the causes of undesirable developments in the Arab world in its own history, not outside it,” he constantly emphasizes.
The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said called Adonis “today’s most daring and provocative Arab poet.”

DER BAUM DES ORIENTS. Gedichte. Aus dem Arabischen von Suleman Taufiq. Edition Orient 2016.
DER WALD DER LIEBE IN UNS. Liebesgedichte. Aus dem Französischen von Ingeborg Waldinger. Jung & Jung Verlag 2013.
WORTGESANG. VON DER DICHTUNG ZUR REVOLUTION. Essays. Herausgegeben von Stefan Weidner. Aus dem Arabischen von Rafael Sanchez Nitzl. S. Fischer Verlag 2012.
VERWANDLUNGEN EINES LIEBENDEN. Gedichte 1958–1971. Aus dem Arabischen von Stefan Weidner. S. Fischer Verlag 2011.

Available in English:
ADONIS: SELECTED POEMS. Translated by Khaled Mattawa. Yale University Press, The Margellos World Series 2012.
THE PAGES OF DAY AND NIGHT. Poems. Translated by Samuel Hazo. Marlboro Press 2000.

ZSÓFIA BÁN

Zsófia Bán published her first novel, ABENDSCHULE (NIGHT SCHOOL), in 2007 when she had just turned fifty. Her debut work astonished readers and critics with its formal daring and verbal capers. This “primer for adults” is clad in the garb of an encyclopedic reader, slyly divided by subject: Chemistry, French, History, Geography, Physical Education, Recess. An erudite and well-read professor of American Studies who teaches at the University of Budapest, Bán also mines familiar figures and topics in literary and cultural history in the individual stories. Zsófia Bán – daughter of Holocaust survivors – lets the dark centers of gravity beneath the playful surface of these stories shine through only on occasion.
In her second collection of stories, ALS NUR DIE TIEREN LEBTEN (WHEN ONLY ANIMALS WERE ALIVE), Bán again lays out apparently disparate life stories and exposes their unexpected connections: emigration and uprootedness, life before and life after – as well as the rift this internal division causes in one’s self. For those Hungarians who were born in Hungary in 1957 – like the author – came into this world one year after the Revolution of 1956. And those who grew up in South America – like the author – know about all the Hungarians in exile who left their country after 1956. The heroines of these stories also fled in the mid-1950s for putative tropical idylls, but their old lives catch up with them all in their new land.
Zsófia Bán’s prose dares readers to dance over the abyss – and challenges them to delight in the freedom of interpretation, which is as delightful as it is difficult.

ALS NUR DIE TIERE LEBTEN. Aus dem Ungarischen von Terézia Mora. Suhrkamp Verlag 2014.
ABENDSCHULE. FIBEL FÜR ERWACHSENE. Aus dem Ungarischen von Terézia Mora. Suhrkamp Verlag 2012.

Available in English:
EXPOSED MEMORIES: FAMILY PICTURES IN PRIVATE AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY. Edited by Zsófia Bán and Hedvig Turai. Central European University Press 2010.

In cooperation with the DAAD Berlin.

MAXIM BILLER

Maxim Biller was born in Prague. After the violent end of the Prague Spring, his Russian-Jewish family moved to Germany in 1970. Biller studied literature in Hamburg and Munich. After completing his studies at the German School of Journalism in Munich, he wrote articles for Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and Tempo magazine, in which his column ‘100 Zeilen Hass’ (100 Lines of Hate) became famous and infamous.
He is a columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit. Since October 2015, Maxim Biller is also a permanent participant of the ZDF television program Literarisches Quartett.
Biller has just written the most Jewish, most American, and most comical works in all of contemporary German fiction. His new novel, BIOGRAPHIE, is the crazy story of Soli and Noah, best friends and quasi-brothers since their Bar mitzvahs in the Hamburg synagogue in 1976. They are bound by their origins, their sense of humor, and their bizarre sexual fantasies – and together they get caught up in a grotesque tale of abduction and blackmail on a global scale.
One of a kind: in German literature there has been nothing like this book, a coming of age-, love-, artist-, family-, Wende-, suspense-, Heimat-, and Holocaust novel in one. Fast-paced, epic, full of punchy dialogue, and highly comic in all its gravity! Elfriede Jelinek is enchanted: “What a book! I am amazed by Maxim Biller’s narrative spirit, very few have anything like it. It literally ignites you. Congratulations, I can’t think of anything comparable!”

BIOGRAFIE. Roman. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2016.
IM KOPF VON BRUNO SCHULZ. Novelle. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2013.
DER GEBRAUCHTE JUDE. Selbstporträt. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2009.

Available in English:
INSIDE THE HEAD OF BRUNO SCHULZ. Novel. Translated by Anthea Bell. Pushkin Collection 2015.
LOVE TODAY: STORIES. Translated by Anthea Bell. Simon & Schuster 2009.

ANNE CARSON

Born in Toronto in 1950, Anne Carson is considered one of the most important poets writing in English today. Susan Sontag called her audacious, erudite, and unsettling and Michael Ondaatje deemed her simply the most exciting English writer of our time.
In her books Anne Carson eschews psychologizing about her characters in favor of more depiction, following models from antiquity in, it must be said, her own idiosyncratic way. She blends irony, pathos, and spareness without artifice. Cobbled together and nonetheless as if made from one piece, her flowing, epic free verse is divided into short chapters and occasionally punctuated with quotations, poems, or prose passages.
Two retranslations of her works were published just last year. In PLAINWATER there are three diary-like pieces of ‘travel writing’. What they have in common is movement – walking the Route of Santiago de Compostela, a car trip through the Midwest, the fictional diary of a swimmer. Carson leaves the genre of travel writing far behind when describing the pilgrimage and brings together descriptions of the landscape and wide-ranging water metaphors. DECREATION, which appeared almost a decade after PLAINWATER is completely different – it is a book that combines opera, essay, and poetry. The long essays in this collection are particularly important. In them, Carson ranges through literary and intellectual history in pursuit of her main interests: the liminal experience between sleep and waking, self-expression in the midst of passion, moments in which men and women are capable of leaving their previous selves behind.

ANTHROPOLOGIE DES WASSERS. Aus dem Englischen von Marie Luise Knott. Matthes und Seitz 2015.
DECREATION. Gedichte, Oper, Essays. Aus dem Englischen von Anja Utler. S. Fischer Verlag 2015.

Available in English:
PLAINWATER: ESSAYS AND POETRY. Vintage 2000.
DECREATION. Verse and prose. Vintage 2006.

BORA ĆOSIć

Born in Zagreb in 1932, Bora Ćosić is one of the great European writers. He has portrayed the senseless, grotesque, absurd, and tragic history of the Balkans from many perspectives in more than thirty books. He has received many awards for his writing.
Bora Ćosić studied philosophy at the University of Belgrade. In the 1950s and 60s, he served on the masthead of various literary magazines. He later worked in the dramaturgical department of a film production company in Belgrade. In 1992, Ćosić left Serbia in protest against the Milošević regime, moving first to Rovinj and later to Berlin. During the Yugoslav Wars, he referred to Belgrade only as “the city from which the war is being waged.”
He is one of the last writers who calls his language Serbo-Croatian and rejects any division of literature along national lines. Despite the cult status of his best known novel, MY FAMILY’S ROLE IN THE WORLD REVOLUTION, and the many prizes awarded it, Ćosić was blacklisted for its satirical, carnevalesque portrayal of socialist society and prevented from publishing for years. In the 1960s, he translated and adapted the musical HAIR, which was staged in Belgrade only a year after its Broadway premiere. In the years after he left Belgrade he published primarily essays, one volume of which was DIARY OF A HOMELESS MAN (1993), one of the most important postwar works from this region. Bora Ćosić has lived in Berlin and in Rovinj in Istria for two decades without any nostalgia for Zagreb or Belgrade (which he now considers little more than a private museum).

DIE TUTOREN. Aus dem Serbischen von Brigitte Döbert. Schöffling Verlag 2015.
LANGE SCHATTEN IN BERLIN. Aus dem Serbischen von Brigitte Döbert: Schöffling Verlag 2014.
EINE KURZE KINDHEIT IN AGRAM. 1932-1937. Aus dem Serbischen von Brigitte Döbert. Schöffling Verlag 2011.

Available in English:
MY FAMILY’S ROLE IN THE WORLD REVOLUTION: AND OTHER PROSE. Translated by Anne Clymer Bigelow, Northwestern University Press. Writings from an Unbound Europe 1997.

DEBORAH FELDMAN

Born in New York in 1986, Deborah Feldman grew up in a strict Hasidic Satmar community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Her mother tongue is Yiddish.
Deborah Feldman’s memoir UNORTHODOX shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list on the day it was published and immediately sold out. A few months later more than a million copies had been printed. Her American publisher explained its success by the fact that never before had an author described being freed from the bonds of religious extremists with such immediacy, honesty, and intelligent insight and in so highly literary a style. The Satmar Hasidim adhere to the strictest rules of ultra-Orthodox communities around the world. The Satmar, as they have called themselves since founding their sect after the Second World War, consider the Holocaust to be a punishment imposed by God and to avert a recurrence of the Holocaust, they lead cloistered lives governed by stringent regulations. Sexuality is taboo and marriages are arranged. Yiddish is their daily language and English is considered an unclean language and is forbidden.
Even as a child, Deborah Feldman objected to the extreme submission required by the rules established by the sect’s founding rabbi, and above all to the marginalization, miserable living conditions, and subordination of women. Her sense of justice and her thirst for knowledge – reinforced by forbidden books – spurred her to question her daily life. UNORTHODOX is a masterful portrayal of a woman’s journey of liberation from profound isolation and fear with one goal: independent thought and feeling. The author currently lives with her son in Berlin.

UNORTHODOX. Aus dem Englischen von Christian Ruzicska. Secession Verlag 2016.

Available in English:
UNORTHODOX: THE SCANDALOUS REJECTION OF MY HASIDIC ROOTS. Simon & Schuster 2012.

JÉRÔME FERRARI

Jérôme Ferrari was born in Paris. THE PRINCIPLE, his fourth book to appear in German, is centered on the German astrophysicist Werner Heisenberg, formulator of the uncertainty principle, which upended classical physics along with the scientific view of the world that had been refined over centuries. Just as Ferrari had avoided the clichés of the airport novel in his SERMON ON THE FALL OF ROME, in this most recent work, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he has not written a biographical novel but “a meticulously documented yet imaginative literary depiction of a German scientist’s fate that manages, as if in a particle accelerator, to let all the scientific, political, philosophical, and existential elements shine.”
When the TAZ asked him what attracted him in Heisenberg’s very German life, Jérôme Ferrari replied, “My decision to engage, as a Frenchman, with such a German fate was particularly interesting because it embodied a moral problem that seems to me almost insoluble. You cannot simply choose to condemn or absolve him, you have to take his complete measure. There are destinies that are obviously heroic and there are some that are manifestly sinister. And between them is the core of human existence, neither the one or the other, which we must grasp in all its complexity. This is where the tragic weight of history lies.”
In 2015, Jérôme Ferrari had to cancel his appearance on short notice. We are delighted that he will participate in the Leukerbad Literary Festival this year.

DAS PRINZIP. Roman. Aus dem Französischen von Christian Ruzicska und Paul Sourzac. Secession Verlag 2015.
BALCO ATLANTICO. Roman. Aus dem Französischen von Christian Ruzicska und Paul Sourzac. Secession Verlag 2013.
PREDIGT AUF DEN UNTERGANG ROMS. Roman. Aus dem Französischen von Christian Ruzicska. Secession Verlag 2013.

Available in English:
SERMON ON THE FALL OF ROME. Novel. Translated by Geoffrey Strachan. Maclehose Press 2014.
WHERE I LEFT MY SOUL. Novel. Translated by Geoffrey Strachan. Maclehose Press 2012.

ZSUZSANNA GAHSE

Zsuzsanna Gahse was born in Budapest in 1946. Her parents fled Hungary with her in 1956. She was educated in Vienna and Kassel, then lived in Stuttgart for more than twenty-five years and later in Luzern. Since 1998, she has lived in Müllheim, Thurgau, about which she wrote a magnificent book in 2004: DURCH UND DURCH – MÜLLHEIM/THUR IN DREI KAPITELN (THROUGH AND THROUGH – MÜLLHEIM/THUR IN THREE CHAPTERS). In her new book, JAN, JANKA, SARA AND I, twenty-three characters recount their observations, sometimes monosyllabically, sometimes tersely or with annoyance, and occasionally joyfully. They share the desire to not be overheard. They want to speak their minds openly and without constraint and to know that what they have said will be preserved and archived. In order to record what they have to say, they go a studio in Büren, a rapidly growing city in Westphalia. They stay on site and have regular recording sessions. But people passing through the area also show up at the studio to record their impressions of the expanding city.
They are joined by a person named ‘I’. Unlike the other residents of Büren, she lives in the valley and does not speak. Instead, she notes down her thoughts. To her, the events in Westphalia are almost a piece of theater.
With JAN, JANKA, SARA AND I, Zsuzsanna Gahse has written a polyphonic story of urbanity, filled with lively characters and temperaments. In ravishing prose, she has created a vivid portrait of modern lifestyles and relationships in a globalized world.
Zsuzsanna Gahse is the author of more than twenty books and a prominent translator of the most important contemporary Hungarian writers. She observes, describes, and analyzes with great sensitivity and precision. Her attentive gaze transcends linguistic and cultural borders.

JAN, JANKA, SARA UND ICH. Erzählungen. Edition Korrespondenzen 2015.
DIE ERBSCHAFT. Prosa mit Zeichnungen von Anna Luchs. Edition Korrespondenzen 2013.
SÜDSUDELBUCH. Prosa. Edition Korrespondenzen 2012.
DONAUWÜRFEL. Gedichte. Edition Korrespondenzen 2010.
DURCH UND DURCH – MÜLLHEIM/THUR IN DREI KAPITELN. Prosa. Edition Korrespondenzen 2004.

Available in English:

VOLATILE TEXTS: US TWO. Translated by Chenxin Jiang. Dalkey Archive Press 2016.

KARL-MARKUS GAUSS

Writer, essayist, critic, and publisher: Karl-Markus Gauss, born in Salzburg in 1954, unites them all in one man. As a writer, Karl-Markus Gauss has distinguished himself primarily through his essays and reportage. In them, he takes a stand for a humane world. In incisive and polished prose, he highlights the various paradoxes and perversions of modern life without succumbing to cultural pessimism.
His literary form is the essay, a hybrid genre that combines awareness of the world and introspection in the depiction and the interpretation of reality. The essay has no fixed view of the world, nor does it try to establish a conclusive one. Instead, the essay is a continuous search that resists the solidification of images. The polyphony in Gauss’ works arises from his determined persistence and shows that daily life is not just events that occur and are reported in the news every day, but is also determined by overseen connections that are perceived, emphasized, and made visible. One of the ostinati in Gauss’ writing is his critical examination of the destruction wrought by global turbo-capitalism in all areas of life. Just how adept the sovereign stylist Karl-Markus Gauss is at deploying language can be seen in the way he deliberately reframes loaded expressions to create new perspectives. He writes, for example, of “hatemongers of individual enrichment,” of “hooligans of neoliberalism,” of a “virtual Reichsparteitag of the internet,” or of a “fatwa” against the fat.

DER ALLTAG DER WELT. ZWEI JAHRE, UND VIELE MEHR. Verlag Paul Zsolnay 2015.
RUHM AM NACHMITTAG. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 2014.
DAS ERSTE, WAS ICH SAH. Paul Zsolnay Verlag 2013.
IM WALD DER METROPOLEN. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 2012.

SABINE GRUBER

Born in Meran in 1963, Sabine Gruber grew up in Lana (Südtirol) and has lived in Vienna for years. She studied German literature, history, and political sciences at the Universities of Vianna and Innsbruck, then lectured at Cá Foscari University in Venice. Along with her teaching and writing, Sabine Gruber is literary co-executor with Renate Mumelter of the South Tyrol author Anita Pichler. Since 1984, she has published novels, short stories, poems, and radio and theater plays. She also writes essays, reviews, glosses, and commentaries and has edited anthologies and books about Anita Pichler’s work.
In her most recent novel, DALDOSSI ODER DAS LEBEN DES AUGENBLICKS (DALDOSSI, OR THE LIFE OF A MOMENT), Sabine Grüber recounts the story of a successful photographer who specializes in working from regions in crisis or at war. Hardened as he is, he breaks down when his partner of many years leaves him for another man. As he grieves for the loss of love, he must grapple with the question of how to live with and process the suffering he captures in his photographs.
In this great novel about war, crises, the journalistic search for truth, and lost love, Sabine Grüber’s writes in beautifully concise, precise prose about people who are at once brave and torn, who cannot manage in our relatively protected world.

DALDOSSI ODER DAS LEBEN DES AUGENBLICKS. Roman. Beck Verlag 2016.
ZU ENDE GEBAUT IST NIE. Gedichte. Haymon Verlag 2014.
STILLBACH ODER DIE SEHNSUCHT. Roman. Beck Verlag 2011.
ÜBER NACHT. Roman. Beck Verlag 2007.

Available in English:
ROMAN ELEGY. Novel. Translated by Peter Lewis 2013.

VIKTOR JEROFEJEW

Viktor Erofeyev was born in Moscow and currently lives near the city. His father was an interpreter and served the Soviet ambassador in Paris for several years. Because of his father’s diplomatic activities, Erofeyev spent part of his childhood in Paris. In 1979, he collaborated on the literary magazine Metropol, which caused a political scandal on publication and resulted in Erofeyev’s expulsion from the writers’ association of the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Erofeyev reissued Metropol, which he called “ an X-ray machine that roentgenized the entire society”, in a series of anthologies.
In GOOD STALIN, Erofeyev reflects on the power structures that prevailed under Stalin, particularly in the entourage of advisors, translators, and diplomats, to which his father belonged.
In his essay collection, RUSSIAN APOCALYPSE, he also dissects contemporary Russia, of which he is a controversial critic – through his appearances on Russian television to the trial of Pussy Riot. Erofeyev’s most recent novel, AKIMUDEN, condenses the “apocalyptic” evidence presented in his essays into a satirical and surreal political parable augmented with espionage and love affairs. As the dead rise again, creating demographic pandemonium, the tense situation in Russia escalates to the fictitious state in the title.

DIE AKIMUDEN. Roman. Hanser Berlin 2013.
RUSSISCHE APOKALYPSE. Essays. Berlin Verlag 2009.
DER GUTE STALIN. Roman. Berlin Verlag 2004.

Available in English:
GOOD STALIN. Novel. Translated by Scott D. Moss. Glagoslav Publishers 2014.
LIFE WITH AN IDIOT. Short stories. Translated by Andrew Reynolds. Penguin Books 2004.
RUSSIAN BEAUTY. Novel. Translated by Andrew Reynolds. Hamish Hamilton 1992.

LLOYD JONES

New Zealand is a young country that had to suffer numerous and often violent waves of occupation and immigration before it finally achieved independence in 1947. The changeable fortunes of history and the fluidity of identity and belonging are written directly in the DNA of this country’s inhabitants. This is also true of the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones who was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt near Wellington. Although he seems to reinvent himself with each of his thematically varied novels, all his works have the same decisive question at their core: Who are we? Who and what determines the always vague and often erratic outlines of our identity? And: how should a writer approach this question in a novel? He himself came to literature indirectly through journalism. After studying political sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, Lloyd Jones traveled through Asia, Europe, and the United States as a reporter and correspondent. Lloyd Jones achieved his deserved international breakthrough with the novel MISTER PIP, which has become the most successful New Zealand book of all time.
In A HISTORY OF SILENCE, Lloyd Jones connects the story of his family and that of his country with great sensitivity and skill. The myths of emigration and of conquering a strange world are combined with literary self-examination. This is Lloyd Jones’ most personal book. In it he traces his roots and shows how important the knowledge of one’s origins is.

GESCHICHTE DER STILLE. EINE SPURENSUCHE IN NEUSEELAND. Roman Aus dem Englischen von Grete Osterwald. Rowohlt Verlag 2015.
HIER, AM ENDE DER WELT, LERNEN WIR TANZEN. Roman. Aus dem Englischen von Grete Osterwald. Rowohlt Verlag 2014.
DIE FRAU IM BLAUEN MANTEL. Roman. Aus dem Englischen von Grete Osterwald. Rowohlt Verlag 2012.
MISTER PIP. Roman. Aus dem Englischen von Grete Osterwald. Rowohlt Verlag 2008.

Available in English:
A HISTORY OF SILENCE. Memoir. John Murray Publishers 2014.
HAND ME DOWN WORLD. Novel. Bloomsbury 2010.
HERE AT THE END OF THE WORLD WE LEARN TO DANCE. Novel. The Dial Press 2008.
MISTER PIP. Novel. The Dial Press 2007.

In cooperation with the DAAD Berlin.

JULIA KISSINA

Julia Kissina was born in Kiev in 1966 and was part of the circle of Moscow conceptual artists around Vladimir Sorokin and Pavel Pepperstein. She gained international renown through her photographs and spectacular art events. She has lived in Berlin as a writer, photographer, and performance artist for a long time. She still writes her books in Russian. Her first book to appear in Germany was the short story collection FORGET TARANTINO. Her style in all her works is marked by absurd humor, incisive observations, and a keen sense of the bizarre.
In her most recent novel, ELEFANTINA’S MOSCOW YEARS. HOW A YOUNG WOMAN LEFT KIEV TO SEEK FORTUNE IN MOSCOW, the young Elefantina, longing for the free life of an artist, follows her idol to the Moscow catacombs. The red-faced poet-guru Pomidor, a man in his best years, is a prominent leader of the avant-garde. Provincial Kiev and its bleak art school are soon forgotten. After wandering through train stations, theater dressing rooms, and museums in search of places to sleep, this nomad in a nun’s garb finds an apartment and soon turns it into an artists’ colony.
Julia Kissin is best known as an artist for her photographs. In the 1990s, she developed the art of “performative photography” and spearheaded a series of art events, among them “The Divine Hunt” (hearding sheep through the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art in 2000). In 2006, she founded the Dead Artists Society, which held spiritualistic séances of ironic dialogues with dead artists like Marcel Duchamp and Kazimir Malevich.

ELEPHANTINAS MOSKAUER JAHRE. Roman. Aus dem Russischen von Ingolf Hoppmann und Olga Kouvchinnikova. Suhrkamp Verlag 2016.
FRÜHLING AUF DEM MOND. Roman. Aus dem Russischen von Valerie Engler. Suhrkamp Verlag 2013.
WHEN SHADOWS CAST PEOPLE. Fotoband. peperoni books 2010.

Available in English:
WHEN SHADOWS CAST PEOPLE. Photographs. English and German editions. peperoni books 2010.

BARBARA KÖHLER

Barbara Köhler was born in 1959 in Burgstadt. She grew up in Amerika, a district of the town of Penig in Saxony, attended school in Plauen, and studied at the Literature Institute in Leipzig. Barbara Köhler has lived in Duisburg since 1994. She contributes articles to art magazines and catalogues and she collaborates with visual artists. Along with publishing poems, essays, and translations since 1996, she has been creating text installations, textual images, and multi-media projects, as well as temporary and permanent works for public spaces and private gardens.
In 2007, Barbara Köhler was awarded the Spycher: Literature Prize Leuk (P. xx). In 2013, Edition Spycher published her 36 ANSICHTEN DES BERGES GORWETSCH (36 VIEWS OF MOUNT GORWETSCH). From her first visit to the Canton of Valais, she has continuously undertaken new and different approaches to Mount Gorwetsch, Leuk’s local mountain, through writing, photography, and on foot.
In the spring of 2014, Barbara Köhler lived in Istanbul for a few weeks: “Too long to be a tourist, yet too little time to adapt to daily life there: in between these options, you remain foreign.” This poet does not simply let this sense of foreignness settle on her, she goes in pursuit of it, forms an image of it for herself and creates pictures. In 23 poems and numerous photographs, a many-sided countenance of Istanbul ‘visibly’ takes shape: colors, strange blooms, the city’s eyes, traces and signs, the foreignness of the language, words, and looks. Nico Bleutge summarizes for the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “One can hardly imagine a better antidote to all the autocratic tendencies of this nimble language and its ‘magical potential’.”

ISTANBUL, ZUSEHENDS. Gedichte, Lichtbilder. Lilienfeld Verlag 2015.
36 ANSICHTEN DES BERGES GORWETSCH. Dörlemann, Zürich 2013.
NEUFUNDLAND. SCHRIFTEN, TEILS BESTIMMT. Edition Korrespondenzen 2012

PEDRO LENZ

Born in 1965, Pedro Lenz is one of the most important voices in Swiss dialect literature and a member of the writers’ group “Bern ist überall’ (Bern is everywhere).
As a writer he does not turn for material to the literary establishment’s ‘high culture’, but to daily life, to the working world of ordinary people with their desires and dreams. In his works, Lenz often gives voice to those whose lives have not worked out. What results are tragic, bleak, but also uplifting stories of everyday life.
Pedro Lenz’s award-winning books are based on his own biography and informed by his keen powers of observation. Before completing his Matura degree and studying Spanish literature for a few semesters at the University of Bern, he worked in construction for seven years as a skilled mason. He still works hard today: Lenz averages 300 performances a year.
Lenz gained renown for his novel in dialect, DER GOALIE BIN IG (NAW MUCH OF A TALKER) and is today one of Switzerland’s most successful authors. This best-selling novel has won many awards, was adapted to the stage and to the screen in a film of the same name, and has been translated into six languages.
Lenz lives in Olten. He writes poetry and fiction and is a columnist for various newspapers and magazines including the NZZ, WoZ, Schweiz am Sonntag, and others. He has composed works for a number of theater companies and for the Swiss radio station SRF.

DER GONDOLIERE DER BERGE. Cosmos 2015.
RADIO. MORGENGESCHICHTEN. Verlag Der gesunde Menschenversand 2014.
LIEBESGSCHICHTE. Roman. Cosmos 2012.
DER GOALIE BIN IG. Roman. Verlag Der gesunde Menschenversand 2010.

Available in English:
NAW MUCH OF A TALKER. Novel. Translated into Scots by Donal McLaughlin. Freight Books 2014.

PANKAJ MISHRA

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India and is one of the most prominent intellectuals in Asia today. He has published numerous essays in Lettre International and The New Yorker, among other publications.
In 2014, he was awarded the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding for his book FROM THE RUINS OF EMPIRE: THE REVOLT AGAINST THE WEST AND THE REMAKING OF ASIA. This book offers a completely new view of the history of the modern world and the key to understanding modern Asia. After the last heirs of the Mughal Empire were killed and the Summer Palace in Beijing was destroyed, the Asian world seemed to have been defeated by the West. For the first time, Pankaj Mishra relates how intellectuals in India, China, and Afghanistan developed a wealth of ideas that became a foundation for a new Asia under these conditions. It was they who inspired Mao and Ghandi and stimulated new strains of Islam. The various countries then struck out on their particular paths into the modern age.
No one has written on this topic as masterfully and knowledgeably as Pankaj Mishra, who approaches the superpower China over its borders, skillfully weaving together political events, travelogue, and history. In his collection of reportage, A GREAT CLAMOUR: ENCOUNTERS WITH CHINA AND ITS NEIGHBORS, he travels from Beijing to Tibet across Mongolia and through other countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan to find out what it is like to live in the shadow of the dragon and to discover what influence proximity to the “Middle Kingdom” has on its neighbors. He offers unusual and illuminating insights into the most important region of the 21^st century. Pankaj Mishra lives in London and Mashobra, a town on edge of the Himalyas.

AUS DEN RUINEN DES EMPIRES. Die Revolte gegen den Westen und der Wiederaufstieg Asiens. Sachbuch. Aus dem Englischen von Michael Bischoff. S. Fischer Verlag 2014.
BEGEGNUNGEN MIT CHINA UND SEINEN NACHBARN. Reportagen. Aus dem Englischen von Michael Bischoff. S. Fischer Verlag 2015.

Available in English:
FROM THE RUINS OF EMPIRE: THE REVOLT AGAINST THE WEST AND THE REMAKING OF ASIA. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012.
A GREAT CLAMOUR: ENCOUNTERS WITH CHINA AND ITS NEIGHBORS. Penguin Books 2014.
TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST: HOW TO BE MODERN IN INDIA, PAKISTAN, TIBET AND BEYOND. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006.

ADOLF MUSCHG

Born in Zürich in 1934, Adolf Muschg was Professor of German Language and Literature at the ETH Zürich from 1970 to 1999. From 2003 to 2006 he was president of the Berlin Academy of the Arts.
Adolf Muschg is a culturally and socially engaged writer, arguably the most important writer in Switzerland after Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In his novels and short stories, he asks a question that runs through his entire oeuvre: How can individuals free themselves from the conditioning of their origins, their childhood, and society?
In Adolf Muschg’s new novel, a man seeks salvation: the historian Beat Schneider disappears because he has lost the woman he loves and has only himself to blame. DIE JAPANISCHE TASCHE (THE JAPANESE BAG) treats an existential theme with masterful skill and refined wit. Man is a social being whose life with others is driven by misunderstandings. How much do we really know each other?
Adolf Muschg writes of illness and loss, of loneliness and failure, of love and betrayal. Much is revealed in this book. What is most distinctive about novel is the way Muschg artfully interweaves these themes.
A confident lightness of touch and subtle irony pervade the novel. In the dialogue and descriptions, Muschg allows empty spaces, faultlines, and shadows to remain. They in turn relieve the book of its weightiness but not its gravity. Rarely have readers been led through a maze with such sly playfulness and serene orneriness.

DIE JAPANISCHE TASCHE. Roman. Beck Verlag 2015.
IM ERLEBENSFALL. Essays 2002–2013. Beck Verlag 2013.
LÖWENSTERN. Roman. Beck Verlag 2012.

Available in English:

THE BLUE MAN AND OTHER STORIES. Translated by Marlis Zeller Cambon and Michael Hamburger. George Braziller 1985.

FRÉDÉRIC PAJAK

Born in 1955 in Suresnes, near Paris, Frédéric Pajak is a writer, artist, and editor of dual Swiss and French nationality. In his works he strikes a balance between prose and drawing to create a unique genre that has won numerous awards. He edits the ‘Cahiers dessinés’ series at Buchet-Chastel Press. At present he divides his time between Paris and the shore of Lake Geneva.
Frédéric Pajak’s UNGEWISSES MANIFEST (HESITANT MANIFESTO) is an unusual book : in nine volumes, of which four have already appeared in French, Pajak interweaves images and text into a captivatingly beautiful Gesamtkunstwerk. The volumes follow a loose, meandering sequence, more associative than chronological, shifting between the author’s personal history and the destinies of historical figures. In the first volume of the ‘Manifesto’, the narrative alternates between Pajak’s childhood memories and episodes from Walter Benjamin’s life in the 1930s.
At the Leukerbad Literary Festival, Frédéric Pajak and his translator Ruth Gantert will present UNGEWISSES MANIFEST. Camille Luscher will moderate the reading and discussion.

RUTH GANTERT pursued her liberal arts studies in Zürich, Paris, and Pisa and was a lecturer in French Literature at the Pädagogischen Hochschule St. Gallen. She is now Director of the Fondazione Casa Atelier Bedigliora (TI), edits the German edition of the trilingual literary journal Viceversa, and serves on the jury of the Swiss Literature Prize.

UNGEWISSES MANIFEST. Aus dem Französischen von Ruth Gantert. Edition Clandestin 2016.
MANIFESTE INCERTAIN 3. LA MORT DE WALTER BENJAMIN. EZRA POUND MIS EN CAGE. Noir sur Blanc 2014.

In cooperation with the CTL – Centre de Traduction Littéraire Université der Lausanne.

DRAGICA RAJČIĆ

Dragica Rajčić was born in Split, Croatia. She began publishing poems and short prose while still in high school. She first came to Switzerland in 1978 – after detours through Australia and Germany. She also began to write in German and was published in literary journals and anthologies. Her first collection of poems in German, HALBGEDICHTE EINER GASTFRAU appeared in 1986. After her return to Croatia in 1988, Dragica Rajčić worked as a journalist until 1991 when she returned to Switzerland a second time after the outbreak of the war in Croatia. She has published volumes of poetry and two plays, devoted herself to humanitarian causes and public relations work related to the war in Croatia, and now works as a freelance author and lecturer in creative writing in Biel.
Christina Bamberg has written of Dragica Rajčić: “With her five works of poetry and short prose, she is a singular figure in the Swiss literary landscape. No other author who writes in German as a second language fragments language so radically. No one else sets her texts so precariously on her own linguistic borders.”
In the Leukerbad Literary Festival, Dragica Rajčić wil read from her new novel, LIEBE UM LIEBE, which will be published in spring 2017. In this novel, she leads her protagonist back to the isolated Dalmatian village of her childhood where distant, dreamlike memories of her early years coalesce into dramatic scenes.

POST BELLUM. Sondereinband. Edition 8 2000.
BUCH VON GLÜCK. Gedichte. Edition 8 2004.
WARTEN AUF BROCH. Text über Text. Studienverlag. Edition Brenner-Forum 2011.

YOUSSEF RAKHA

Youssef Rakha was born in 1976 in Cairo, where he was raised and still lives today. He studied English literature and philosophy in England and lived for a time in Abu Dhabi. His travels have taken him throughout Europe, Asia, and the Arab world. He describes his homeland as “middle-class Cairo.”
Youssef Rakha is one of the most innovative contemporary writers in the Arab world. He writes poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and essays in Arabic and English and is a photographer, primarily in black and white. His works have been published in various newspapers and magazines. Two of his three novels have been translated into English.
He began writing in English to make Cairo after the turn of the millennium accessible to a wider circle and spark international conversation. Youssef Rakha pours his affectionate ties to Cairo and his engagement with the current, pressing issues in Egypt and the Arab world into his moving, lyrical novels, which are indebted to the Arab tradition of storytelling while adapting it to the present day.
At the Leukerbad Literary Festival, his reportage will be presented in German for the first time. In his reportage, he embarks on an investigation of current Arab sexual life – in front of the camera, behind the veil, in the privacy of the home, and on the internet. He shows that freedom and sexual freedom go hand in hand and that the demands of the Arab Spring are more comprehensive than before and just as relevant.

Available in English:
THE BOOK OF THE SULTAN'S SEAL: STRANGE INCIDENTS FROM HISTORY IN THE CITY OF MARS. From the Arabic by Paul Starkey. Seven Stories Press 2014.
THE CROCODILES. Novel. From the Arabic by Robin Moger. Seven Stories Press 2014.

JAN PHILIPP REEMTSMA

Jan Philipp Reemtsma was born into a family of prominent entrepreneurs in Bonn in 1952. He studied literature and philosophy at Hamburg University.
He is a patron of the arts and in the field of literary studies, he has devoted himself primarily to research on Arno Schmidt and Christoph Martin Wieland. In 1981, Jan Philipp Reemtsma founded the Arno Schmidt Stiftung, a foundation dedicated to publishing Schmidt’s complete works. His other areas of research include literatures of the 18^th and 20^th centuries, Civilization Theory, and the history of human destructiveness.
His abduction for 33 days in the spring of 1996 caused a sensation. He wrote about his time as a captive in IN THE CELLAR. His recent works include WAS HEISST: EINEN LITERARISCHEN TEXT INTERPRETIEREN? VORAUSSETZUNGEN UND IMPLIKATIONEN DES REDENS ÜBER LITERATUR (C.H.Beck 2016), SCHRIFTEN ZUR LITERATUR (3 Bde., C.H. Beck 2015), and his study of violence, VERTRAUEN UND GEWALT. VERSUCH ÜBER EINE BESONDERE KONSTELLATION DER MODERNE, released in a new edition in 2013 and available in English translation as TRUST AND VIOLENCE: AN ESSAY ON A MODERN RELATIONSHIP, along with two studies of writers, LESSING IN HAMBURG (C.H. Beck 2007) and ÜBER ARNO SCHMIDT. VERMESSUNGEN EINES POETISCHEN TERRAINS (Suhrkamp 2006).
These works reveal Reemtsma’s acute sense of differentiation and his ability to treat a wide array of subjects. He delivered the laudatory speeches when Jürgen Habermas was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and when Alexander Kluge received the Georg Büchner Prize.

WAS HEISST: EINEN LITERARISCHEN TEXT INTERPRETIEREN? VORAUSSETZUNGEN UND IMPLIKATIONEN DES REDENS UEBER LITERATUR. Beck Verlag 2016.
SCHRIFTEN ZUR LITERATUR. Beck Verlag 2015.
VERTRAUEN UND GEWALT: VERSUCH UEBER EINE BESONDERE KONSTELLATION DER MODERNE. Hamburger Edition 2013.
MEHR ALS EIN CHAMPION: ÜBER DEN STIL DES BOXERS MUHAMMAD ALI. Hamburger Edition 2013.
MORD AM STRAND. ALLIANZEN VON ZIVILISATION UND BARBAREI. Hamburger Edition 1998.
IM KELLER. Rowohlt Taschenbuch 1998.

Available in English:

TRUST AND VIOLENCE: AN ESSAY ON A MODERN RELATIONSHIP. Translated by Dominic Bonfiglio. Princeton University Press 2012.
IN THE CELLAR. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Alfred A. Knopf 1999.
MORE THAN A CHAMPION: THE STYLE OF MUHAMMAD ALI. Translated by John E. Woods. Alfred A. Knopf 1998.

RAOUL SCHROTT

Raoul Schrott was born in 1964 in Landeck and grew up in Landeck, Tunisia, and Zürich. One of his poetic postulates is the insistence that reality not be left to philosophers and scientists “because the physic of nature is the only real counterpart with which poetry can engage when truth is a priority.”
With his essay collection HANDBUCH DER WOLKENPUTZEREI (HANDBOOK OF CLOUD CLEANING), Raoul Schrott shows himself not only to be a theoretician of the poetic craft, but also a critic of the feuilleton: “There is a dialectic of pretentiousness that enthusiastically overlooks the work itself.” Indeed, his translations have often received sharp criticism, which Schrott used as an occasion to engage his critics in passionate argument.
After more than a decade, Raoul Schrott has published a new collection of poems, DIE KUNST AN NICHTS ZU GLAUBEN (THE ART OF NOT BELIEVING IN ANYTHING). It is a panorama of the all too human. The poems are framed with sentences from the first atheistic bible from the 17^th century, “The Manual of Transitory Existence”. In between are individual portraits of working people from bus driver to judge. They all pose questions about living a successful life and all find beauty in failure.
Heresy has always been a passion of Schrott’s. On one of his very first expeditions into the early history of classical poetry, this intercontinental traveler among the world’s languages put the literary world into an uproar with his audacious assertions.

DIE KUNST AN NICHTS ZU GLAUBEN. Gedichte. Hanser Verlag 2015.
HESIOD. THEOGONIE. Übersetzt und erläutert von Raoul Schrott. Hanser Verlag 2014.
ILIAS. Übertragen von Raoul Schrott. Kommentiert von Peter Mauritsch. Fischer Taschenbuch 2010.
FINIS TERRAE. Roman. Fischer Taschenbuch 2009.

MONIQUE SCHWITTER

Monique Schwitter was born in Zürich in 1972 and has lived in Hamburg since 2005. She studied acting and directing and has performed in theaters in Zürich, Frankfurt, Graz, and Hamburg. She now works fulltime as a writer.
The main character in Monique Schwitter’s new novel undertakes a love quest. She retraces the story of her life and loves, twelve men who have much more than their names in common with the apostles, the emissaries of faith and love.
This is an unconventional love story: it has few sex scenes and is not at all salacious, yet it nonetheless depicts its characters intimately. The relationships it portrays are intense and wild, short and long, and never predictable.
What is that thing we call love? How can it come and go? And where does it go when it passes? And what’s up with her current love? He’s always sitting in his room, checking his email or watching television.
In her new novel, Monique Schwitter evokes a kind of magical thinking since love can only be understood as circuit of arrivals and departures.
Monique Schwitter was a slightly tragic star of last year’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize competition in Klagenfurt. The jury praised the excerpt from her novel ONE ANOTHER more enthusiastically than the others – and yet she did not receive any of the awards. This is surely unfair because Schwitter presented an excellent text with which she has won over many critics, a large reading public, and other juries since Klagenfurt.
This year ONE ANOTHER is the featured novel in the translators’ colloquium.

EINS IM ANDERN. Roman. Droschl Verlag 2015.
GOLDFISCHGEDÄCHTNIS. Erzählungen. Droschl Verlag 2011.
OHREN HABEN KEINE LIDER. Roman. Residenz Verlag 2008.

Available in English:
ONE ANOTHER. Novel. Translated by Tess Lewis. Forthcoming Persea Books 2017.
GOLDFISH MEMORY. Short stories. Translated by Eluned Gramich. Parthian Books 2015.

CLEMENS J. SETZ

Clemens J. Setz was born in Graz in 1982 and studied German literature and mathematics in his hometown. During his studies, he wrote poems and short stories for magazines and Austrian radio.
His new novel, DIE STUNDE ZWISCHEN FRAU UND GITARRE (THE HOUR BETWEEN WOMAN AND GUITAR), is one of the craziest, funniest, most absurd and devastating books to have appeared in a long time.
The protagonist Natalie is 21 years old and lives in Graz. She has just finished her training and started her first job working in a home for the handicapped. One of Natalie’s patients is Alexander Dorm. He is a wheelchair-bound misogynist and unconventional in other ways as well.
Dorm has a criminal past: Years before, he had fallen deeply in love with another man and stalked and harassed him to such an extent that the man’s wife committed suicide. Of all people, it is Dorm’s stalking victim – Christopher Holberg by name – who comes to visit him regularly.
Through Natalie’s radically personal perspective, Clemens J. Setz portrays a world in which all categories are suspended and subverted. Who is a perpetrator and who a victim? Who is the stalker and who is the stalked? Who is normal and who outside the norm? What is reality, what is delusion?
This novel is no echo chamber, that is, it does not confirm what we already know or suspect. Instead it shows a completely undiscovered perceptual world and to that world belongs a victim’s revenge, so long drawn out that it will presumably escape notice.

DIE STUNDE ZWISCHEN FRAU UND GITARRE. Roman. Suhrkamp Verlag 2015.
TILL EULENSPIEGEL – DREISSIG STREICHE UND NARRETEIEN. Nacherzählt von Clemens J. Setz. Mit Illustrationen von Philip Waechter. Suhrkamp Verlag 2015.
DIE VOGELSTRAUSSTROMPETE. Gedichte. Suhrkamp Verlag 2014.
INDIGO. Roman. Suhrkamp Verlag 2012.

Available in English:
INDIGO. Novel. Translated by Ross M. Benjamin. Liveright 2014.

ANITA SIEGFRIED

Anita Siegfried was born in 1948 and grew up in Basel and Aarau. She studied archeology and art history at the University of Zürich. After her studies, she lived abroad as a fellow of the Swiss Institute in Rome and in other places. She later worked for the Canton of Zürich Archeology Department and on a project for the Swiss National Science Foundation. Since 1994 she has lived in Zürich as a freelance writer. She has written three novels, many childrens’ and young adult books, and radio broadcasts. She is also a coach for the ‘Schoolhouse Novel Project” and works for JULL the literary writing workshop for young adults.
Anita Siegfried’s novel, STEIGENDE PEGEL (RISING WATER LEVEL), recounts the life of the genius engineer Pietro Caminadas, a man who emigrated to South America to seek his fortune. His architectonic visions brought him to Rio de Janiero, where he built a tram, redesigned the port, and drew up the first blueprints for Brasilia. He soon returned to Rome with his wife and children and there he astonished everyone with his massive project: plans for a transalpine canal that would make the Alps navigable from Genoa to Splügen to Thusis and on to Basel. Charles Linsmayer affirmed in the NZZ am Sonntag that “Anita Siegfried draws characters like the unfortunate Caminada, his wife Luiza, and the clever Balzani, but also the boatmen Sergio and Riccio as skillfully and true to life as she does the period atmosphere of colonial Brazil or Fascist Italy.

STEIGENDE PEGEL. Roman. Bilgerverlag 2016.
DIE SCHATTEN FERNER JAHRE. Dörlemann Verlag 2007.
MIRA. STELLA MIRABILIS. Dörlemann Verlag 2004.

SHUMONA SINHA

Born in Kolkata in 1973, Shumona Sinha moved to France in 2001. To support herself she worked for a long time as an interpreter in an asylum office in Paris – like her protagonist. She also published several volumes of poetry. She was subsequently let go because it did not occur to her to seek her government employer’s approval before publishing her novel ASSOMMONS LES PAUVRES! (THRASH THE POOR!), the title of which is taken from a poem by Charles Baudelaire.
When a migrant in the Metro yells abuse at the novel’s narrator after an exhausting day at work, all her pent up rage at men who demand asylum but reject equality for women and look down at working women breaks out of her. She hits the man over the head with a bottle. The narrator who had been working as an intermediary between illegal refugees and lawyers is now herself a case for the officials. She sits in a cell, is interrogated, and reflects on her life and her own flight. Sinha uses these two story lines to introduce into her novel fundamental considerations on the right to asylum and the difficult role of interpreters. Her charged language goes straight to the reader’s core.
Shumona Sinha pillories both the law’s inhumanity, which makes it necessary for immigrants to tell certain lies for which they are then reproached, and good people who burnish their bad conscience. THRASH THE POOR! takes a sweeping blow at all who are a part of the system – the supplicants as well as those who have a say and therefore power over others’ lives.

ERSCHLAGT DIE ARMEN! Roman. Aus dem Französischen von Lena Müller. Edition Nautilus 2015.

VLADIMIR SOROKIN

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a village outside of Moscow and is considered one of the most important writers in Russia today. Under the Soviets, he was considered the enfant terrible of contemporary Russian literature on account of his novels, which were openly critical of the system. The author, who has been translated into many other languages, continues to grate on political powers in Russia with his fantastical novels. A few years ago, Putin’s nationalistic youth movement, ‘Walking Together’, even staged a public burning of Sorokin’s books.
In his new novel, TELLURIA, set in the mid-21^st century, the geopolitical system has been completely upended. Russia has disintegrated and the rest of western Europe has been atomized into small-state regionalism. Sorokin takes his readers on a journey through this deformed geography. A patchwork of small, sectionalist territories has replaced the large nation-states. Omnipresent in this scenario is Tellur, universally hoarded and desired, drug and balm. Everyone has succumbed to Tellur and does whatever they can to get it. A telluric nail is driven into the user’s skull, granting him visions and revelations, even contact with the dead. For some, the trips are lethal. The novel is comprised of fifty short stories that could well be episodes in a series. Each episode is written in a different literary genre: fairy tale, reportage, flash drama or long poem – the Russian master of the Postmodern masters them all. No less than eight renowned translators came together to tackle this work and do justice to the diversity of voices in Sorokin’s retro-futuristic vision.

TELLURIA. Roman. Aus dem Russischen übersetzt vom Kollektiv Hammer und Nagel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2015.
DER SCHNEESTURM. Roman. Aus dem Russischen von Andreas Tretner. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2012.
DER TAG DES OPRITSCHNIKS. Roman. Aus dem Russischen von Andreas Tretner. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2007.

Available in English:
THE BLIZZARD. Novel. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2015.
DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK. Novel. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2011.
THE QUEUE. Novel. Translated by Sally Laird. New York Review Books 2008.

DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ

Dubravka Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina, Yugoslavia. She studied in the Faculty of Arts at the Univeristy of Zagreb and after getting her degree she worked there for 20 years in the Institute for Theory of Literature. Her area of specialty was the Russian avant-garde. She published several collections of short stories and one novel – her so-called pre-war era was characterized primarily by her cheerful experimentation with a wide variety of literary genres and styles.
In 1993, Dubravka Ugrešić, who rejects all forms of nationalism and chauvisnism, left Croatia and went into exile in Amsterdam and the USA, where she taught at a number of universities.
Ugrešić’s experience of exile, like her stance o n the disintegration of Yugoslavia, is reflected in her essay collections, AMERIČKI FIKCIONAR (MY AMERICAN FICTIONARY) and KULTURA LAŽI (THE CULTURE OF LIES), which have been translated into almost all European languages. Her novel, MUZEJ BEZUVJETNE PREDAJE (THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER), was also an international success.
Of the essay collection KARAOKE CULTURE, which appeared in German translation in 2011, Ilma Rakusa wrote “Dubravka Ugrešić’s sharp mind, like her sharp tongue, shine brightly in her new essays. She offers almost 400 pages of cultural criticism and diagnoses of our times, Vergangenheitsbewältigung and Balkan bashing, all of it serious, witty and polemical.”
Dubravka Ugrešić lives in Amsterdam and the US, where she continues to teach. Her books have been translated into almost thirty languages.

KARAOKEKULTUR. Essays. Aus dem Kroatischen von Mirjana und Klaus Wittmann. Berlin Verlag 2011.
BABA JAGA LEGT EIN EI. Roman. Aus dem Kroatischen von Mirjana und Klaus Wittmann. Berlin Verlag 2008.
KEINER ZU HAUSE. Essays. Aus dem Kroatischen von Mirjana und Klaus Wittmann, Angela Richter, Barbara Antkowiak. Berlin Verlag 2007.

Available in English:
EUROPE IN SEPIA. Essays. Translated by David Williams. Open Letter Books 2014.
KARAOKE CULTURE. Essays. Translated by David Williams. Open Letter Books 2011.
BABA YAGA LAID AN EGG. Novel. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac. Open Letter Books 2010.
NOBODY’S HOME. Essays. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac. Open Letter Books 2008.

ANJA UTLER

The poet, essayist, and translator Anja Utler was born in Swansdorf in 1973 and studied Slavic and English languages and literatures and speech training. Her poetry – most of it available not only in print, but in audio format as well – has won numerous awards and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
In her poems, Anja Utler plumbs the connections between thinking, feeling, and the body and grants current affairs an important role. She believes verse has the potential to create “liberating uncertainty.” Her poems do not express distanced observations of the world, but create a world themselves as the jury statement of the Basel Poetry Prize put it.
In her speech sudden poppy, Anja Utler said about when reading poems from a reception-aesthetics point of view, “[y]es: I am astonished by a poem’s ability to unsettle my coordinates of world, of speech, and of myself.”
Her new book, VON DEN KNOCHEN DER SANFTHEIT (ON THE BONES OF SOFTNESS), explores such questions as: How to speak? What does speech look like that can actually make connections visible rather then obscuring or coarsening them and without sedating one’s relationship to these connections? And what should a poem look like so that it doesn’t just jingle prettily, but with its articulation make different movements possible for the body and the mind? Anja Utler’s answers run athwart the current discourses and open a field of new questions.

Anje Utler translated Anne Carson’s DECREATION and will be her German voice at the Leukerbad Literary Festival.

VON DEN KNOCHEN DER SANFTHEIT. BEHAUPTUNGEN, REDEN, QUERGÄNGE. Edition Korrespondenzen 2016.
AUSGEÜBT. EINE KURSKORREKTUR. Edition Korrespondenzen 2011.
JANA. VERMACHT. Edition Korrespondenzen 2009.

ELIOT WEINBERGER

Eliot Weinberger was born in 1949 in New York, where he still lives. His essays, acclaimed by cultural publications throughout the world, are known for their stylistic brilliance and intellectual acuity and have been translated into more than thirty languages. They combine documentary techniques and high literary standards. A selection of his essays translated into German are collected in the volumes KASKADEN, DAS WESENTLICHE und ORANGEN! ERDNÜSSE!
Eliot Weinberger is also the main translator of the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz. He has translated other Latin American poets into English as well. He has also been active in fostering an appreciation for Chinese poetry in the West, including that of the exiled poet Bei Dao, and edited the NEW DIRECTIONS ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY.
In THE WALL, THE CITY, AND THE WORLD, Weinberger published three texts that are formally situated between the essay and poetry and are concerned with the ways in which civilizations rise and fall. He has collaborated with artists like the Maori painter Shane Cotton and the filmmaker Robert Gardner and, with Lydia Davis, he wrote TWO AMERICAN SCENES, a poetic diptych inspired by 19^th century literature.
He writes regularly for international publications like the London Review of Books and Lettre International. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Weinberger is the only U.S. literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.

ORANGEN! ERDNÜSSE! Aus dem Englischen von Peter Torberg. Berenberg Verlag 2011.
DAS WESENTLICHE. Aus dem Englischen von Peter Torberg. Berenberg Verlag 2008.
KASKADEN. Aus dem Englischen von Peter Torberg. Suhrkamp Verlag 2003.

Available in English:
THE WALL, THE CITY, AND THE WORLD. Prose. Readux 2014.
ORANGES & PEANUTS FOR SALE. Essays. New Directions 2009.
AN ELEMENTAL THING. Essays. New Directions 2007.
KARMIC TRACES. Essays. New Directions 2001.

BENEDICT WELLS

Benedict Wells, a guest in Leukerbad for the first time with his debut novel in 2009, was born in Munich in 1984. After receiving his Abitur diploma, he moved to Berlin and decided to do what he what he most wanted: become a writer. In his first novel, BECKS LETZTER SOMMER (BECK’S LAST SUMMER) Wells brings his protagonist’s youthful dream into reach. When frustrated teacher Robert Beck realizes that one of his students is a musical genius, he pictures himself as the boy’s future manager. The novel was made into a movie starring Christian Ulmen. Well’s third novel FAST GENIAL (NEAR GENIUS) was on the bestseller lists for months. Music is always a central element of his stories, which is why there are soundtracks for Wells’ books.
In VOM ENDE DER EINSAMKEIT (THE END OF LONELINESS), Benedict Wells presents the story of three siblings who lost their parents in a car crash much too early. The online magazine soundandbooks writes, “VOM ENDE DER EINSAMKEIT is a wonderful novel about growing old, memory, existential philosophy, the passage of time, freedom, and the ability to determine one’s life and death. It is good to know that a young writer like Benedict Wells does not leave these topics entirely to his older colleagues, but is ready to take on the essential matters of life.”
After living in Barcelona for several years, Wells has returned to Berlin and is an active member of the German writers’ national football team ‘Autonama’.

VOM ENDE DER EINSAMKEIT. Roman. Diogenes 2016.
FAST GENIAL. Roman. Diogenes 2012.
SPINNER. Roman. Diogenes 2009.
BECKS LETZTER SOMMER. Roman. (Diogenes 2008) Detebe 2009.

LUKAS BÄRFUSS

Lukas Bärfuss was born in Thun in 1971 and is one of the most successful playwrights of recent years. His plays have been performed throughout the world. He has also established himself as a critical thinker and brilliant speaker as well as an engaged and uncompromising commentator on political and social developments.
Hardly any other Swiss writer has occasioned greater public reverberations internationally than Lukas Bärfuss. When he reflects on large subjects like freedom, mendacity, space, and time, and asks himself, “Where am I right here, right now?”, he does not do so in a void of abstraction.
What Bärfuss finds lacking again and again is not morality in the stereotypical sense. Rather, he regrets the general lack of will to repeatedly question what is actually real, today, in our rapidly changing, highly mediatized world.

STIL UND MORAL. Essays. Wallstein 2015.
KOALA. Roman. Wallstein 2014.
HUNDERT TAGE. Roman. Wallstein 2008.

Available in English:
ONE HUNDRED DAYS. Translated by Tess Lewis. Granta Books. 2013.
THE SEXUAL NEUROSES OF OUR PARENTS. Play. Translated by Neil Blackadder. Nick Hern Books 2008.

JONAS LÜSCHER

In 2013, Jonas Lüschers’ fiction debut, BARBARIAN SPRING was the literary discovery of the year: widely praised, the novella sold well and was read even more widely.
Born in Switzerland in 1976, Lüscher lives in Munich. After completing his teacher training in Bern and working in the German film industry for several years, he studied philosophy at the ETH Zürich. He worked on his dissertation under Michael Hampe, examining the importance of narrative in describing societal complexity against the background of Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. Lüscher left the ETH in 2014 without completing his dissertation.

FRÜHLING DER BARBAREN. Novelle. C.H. Beck 2013.

Available in English:
BARBARIAN SPRING. Novella. Translated by Peter Lewis. Haus Publishing 2014.

URS MANNHART

Born in Rohrbach in the Canton of Bern, Urs Mannhart has worked as bicycle courier, night watchman, and journalist. Along with Christoph Simon and Lorenz Langenegger, he is a member of the ‘die Autoren’ writers’ group. Bilger Press published his first novel, LUCHS (LYNX), in 2004 and in 2006 DIE ANOMALIE DES GEOMAGNETISCHEN FELDES SÜDÖSTLICH VON DOMODOSSOLA (THE ANOMALY OF THE GEOMAGNETIC FIELD SOUTHEAST OF DOMODOSSOLA).
Mannhart has reported from Hungary, Serbia, Kosovo, Romania, Russia, Belarus, Transnistria, and Ukraine. In 2014, his long awaited third book appeared, BERGSTEIGEN IM FLACHLAND (MOUNTAIN CLIMBING IN THE PLAINS): a major and impressive novel of Europe that is finally available again after sales were suspended due to a spurious accusation of plagiarism.

BERGSTEIGEN IM FLACHLAND. Roman. secessions Verlag Berlin 2014.
DIE ANOMALIE DES GEOMAGNETISCHEN FELDES SÜDÖSTLICH VON DOMODOSSOLA. Roman. Bilgerverlag 2006.
LUCHS. Roman. Bilgerverlag 2004.

DANIEL SCHWARTZ

Daniel Schwartz was born in 1955 and lives in Zürich. He is an internationally renowned photographer and longtime contributor to the Swiss cultural magazine du. In 2008 he published SCHNEE IN SAMARKAND. EIN REISEBERICHT AUS DREITAUSEND JAHREN (SNOW IN SAMARKAND: A TRAVELOGUE OF THREE THOUSAND YEARS), a brilliant book of more than one thousand pages. It accomplishes a feat that had never before been attempted in this form: the endeavor to travel through time and space, to see the present from the perspective of the past, and to understand the ways the Chinese, Persians, Europeans, and Arabs see each other as foreign.
With his “historical images”, Daniel Schwartz elucidates precarious human existence and constant existential uncertainty and points to profound imbalances and inherited misunderstandings that have resulted from political developments.

SCHNEE IN SAMARKAND. EIN REISEBERICHT AUS DREITAUSEND JAHREN. Eichborn 2008.
GESCHICHTEN VON DER GLOBALISIERUNG. Daniel Schwartz (Hrsg.) Steidl Verlag. 2003.

Available in English:

TRAVELLING THROUGH THE EYE OF HISTORY. With 165 photographs. Thames & Hudson 2009.