Authors
Appearing in the 24th Leukerbad
International Literary Festival:
Mariam Al-Saedi, United Arab Emirates
Nora Amin, Egypt
Aleida Assmann, Germany
Jan Assmann, Germany
María Cecilia Barbetta, Argentina/Germany
Priya Basil, Great Britain
Petr Borkovec, Czech Republic
Christos Chryssopoulos, Greece
Zoltán Danyi, Hungary/Serbia
Elisa Shua Dusapin, Switzerland
Theresia Enzensberger, Germany
Karl-Markus Gauss, Austria
Claire Genoux, Switzerland
Lavinia Greenlaw, Great Britain
Durs Grünbein, Germany
Rolf Hermann, Switzerland
Federico Italiano, Italy
Pedro Lenz, Switzerland
Frances Leviston, Great Britain
Johanna Lier, Switzerland
Tanja Maljartschuk, Ukraine/Austria
Petros Markaris, Greece
Francesca Melandri, Italy
Fernanda Melchor, Mexico
Eman Mohammed Turki, United Arab Emirates
Gianna Molinari, Switzerland
Terézia Mora, Germany
Adolf Muschg, Switzerland
Madame Nielsen, Denmark
Alan Pauls, Argentina
Antoinette Rychner, Switzerland
Géraldine Schwarz, Germany/France
Vladimir Sorokin, Russia
Ré Soupault, Germany
Aleš Šteger, Slovenia
Maria Stepanova, Russia
Christian Uetz, Switzerland
Aglaja Veteranyi, Switzerland
Jan Wagner, Germany
Nell Zink, USA
Translators
Angelica Ammar
Marta Eich
Franco Filice
Carla Imbrogno
Andreas Jandl
Gulnoz Nabieva
Anne Posten
Shiri Shapira
Mariam Al-Saedi
Mariam Al-Saedi was born in Al Ain in 1974. She studied English literature and completed her post-graduate work in city planning at the American University of Sharjah and in Islamic Jerusalem Studies at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. She lives in Abu Dhabi and works for the Ministry of Transportation.
Mariam’s Al-Saedi’s fiction is reminiscent of Peter Bichsel; she puts “little” people in the spotlight and portrays their search for personal development and individual freedom. Her characters move through fields of tension in a society caught between progress and tradition. She has described her goal in writing as a deeper understanding for the concept of “living”.
One of her stories was published in the anthology In a Fertile Desert. Modern Writing from the United Arab Emirates (Arabia, 2009), also published – unfortunately not in an ideal translation – under the title Mariam und das Glück (Mariam and Happiness, Lisan, 2009).
Mariam Al-Saedi and Eman Mohammed Turki will read newly translated work in Leukerbad and will speak with Nora Amin about the situation of women writers in the Arab world.
Nora Amin
Nora Amin was born in Cairo in 1970. She is a freelance writer, performer, and theater director. Her work spans the realms of literature, theater, dance and feminism. She is associated with a movement of political activism in which the artist takes on the role of rebel opposing traditions of patriarchy, authority, sexism, and racism. Since 2000, she has been forging important new paths outside state-sponsored and commercial theater. She writes novels, short stories, essays, and poems in which she connects political engagement with the search for new literary forms of expression, without shying away from provocation. She was the Samuel Fischer Guest Professor at the Free University in Berlin, where she currently lives.
Nora Amin has maintained a woman’s view of her own: in her book Weiblichkeit im Aufbruch (Migrating the Feminine), based on her own experiences, she explores the role of the female body in the public sphere, using as an example the violent events on Tahrir Square. In this passionate political essay, she connects her thoughts on the role of women in Arab societies to reflections on privacy, intimacy, and physicality. Surprising and rather shocking memories of traumatic events run through this original and intense text, along with memories from her childhood up to her experiences as a woman in Western societies.
“Perspectives” conversation series
Migrating the Feminine, Essay. Amazon Digital 2016.
Aleida Assmann
Aleida Assmann is a German professor of English and Literary Studies, Egyptology, and cultural anthropology. She has published many books on English literature and the history of literary communication. Since the 1990s, she has focused on cultural anthropology, particularly on Cultural and Communicative Memory. With her husband, Jan Assmann, she was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
Aleida Assmann is highly attuned to the way the past is reflected in the present. Her work is centered on the question of what role memory and cultural legacy can and do play in cultural identity today. In her book, Der europäischen Traum (The European Dream,) Aleida Assmann develops, in analogy to the ‘American Dream’, four lessons that Europeans have drawn from history. These determine the project of Europe. Whether or not Europe has a future depends in part on the extent to which these lessons are recognized as a common foundation and orientation and are implemented. “What is necessary, is a dialogical act of remembering,” Aleida Assmann says. “Because what will happen when the strong influx of migrant peoples mix, when new memories become rooted alongside local memories?”
In her book Menschenrechte und Menschenpflichten (Human Rights and Human Obligations), Aleida Assmann makes the case for a new social contract in which human rights and values like empathy and solidarity are essential.
“Perspectives” conversation series
Empathy and its Limits, by Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.
Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identi. ty, by Aleida Assmann and Sarah Clift. Fordham University Press, 2015
Jan Assmann
The Egyptologist Jan Assmann taught for many years in Heidelberg. His wide-ranging work repeatedly sparked debates on cultural and religious questions. Together with his wife, Aleida Assmann, he developed the Theory of Cultural and Communicative Memory, which adopted and further developed the concept of collective memory formulated by the French sociologist and psychologist Maurice Halbwachs. The pair were recognized with the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
Assmann’s most recent study, Achsenzeit (Axial Age,) takes up the concept formulated by Karl Jaspers of a period in human history in which religious and philosophical ideas of ‘humanity’ and ‘transcendence’ appeared simultaneously in several different cultures, ideas which continue to shape us today. It is a view of history that leaves Eurocentrism behind without abandoning ‘European values’.
Jan Assmann accessibly presents the historical panorama of the Axial Age theory and show how necessary a return to history is to an understanding of the present. The present requires memory. The future requires origins, as the now deceased philosopher Odo Marquard well knew. That memory does not occur on its own but must be continuous refashioned is one of the many-faceted insights that make this book an epochal work in every sense of the word.
“Perspectives” conversation series
The Invention of Relition: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus, by Jan Assmann, translated by Robert Savage. Princeton University Press, 2018.
The Price of Monotheism, by Jan Assmann, translated by Robert Savage. Stanford University Press, 2009.
María Cecilia Barbetta
María Cecilia Barbetta was born in Buenos Aires in 1972. She attended the German school in Buenos Aries and then chose German for her foreign language studies. She came to Berlin in 1996 on a DAAD Fellowship and stayed. She has been a freelance writer since 2005. She writes her novels in German.
María Cecilia Barbetta worked for many years on her new novel Nachtleuchten (Afterglow), her second after her celebrated novel Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros (The Los Milagros Tailor Shop), which appeared in 2008. Once again, Barbetta has set her fiction in the city of her birth, more precisely, in the northern suburb Ballester, where she grew up. Her settings include a Catholic convent school, an auto repair shop, bakery, laundromat, and hair salon.
The atmosphere is rife with the tension preceding a political revolution. Barbetta taps into the experiences of her childhood when a military dictatorship ruled her country and the adults’ fear was palpable and omnipresent, engraved in the emotional makeup of her generation.
Barbetta’s novel captivates readers as much with its portrayal of ambient fear, as by its humor and colorful wordplay, which the author expresses with typographical wit. This book is an irresistible mixture of spirit, wit, pacing and originality, a work that is playful and nimble but weighty.
Nachtleuchten. Novel. S.Fischer Verlag 2018.
Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros. Novel. S. Fischer Verlag 2010.
Priya Basil
Born in London in 1977, Priya Basil is a British writer of Indian heritage. She grew up in Kenya, studied in Great Britain, and currently lives in Berlin. She has published several novels and a novella along with numerous essays for various newspapers. She is actively engaged in various groups advocating peace and world-wide arms control.
Recurring topics in her non-fiction writing include identity, art, mass surveillance, democracy, (neo-)colonialism, and the European Union. Her most recent book, Be My Guest: Reflections on Hospitality is a hybrid text combining essay and memoir forms. Priya Basil invites her readers to be her guests: a word that sparks anticipation of a stimulating evening of delicious food and good conversation. But celebrated hospitality is much more than this – it is a many-faceted give-and-take that encompasses family, friends, and strangers and is different in every culture. Priya Basil recounts her family’s Indian-Kenyan traditions, an unexpected invitation to eat asparagus, and a mass-meal in a Sikh temple in central Berlin. She offers a passionate plea for a hospitable Europe and repeatedly invites readers into her own kitchen. The best conversations – about God and the world, politics and culture, and the question of whether or not there is such a thing as unconditional hospitality – always take place at a generously laid table.
Be My Guest: Reflections on Hospitality. Forthcoming 2019.
Strangers on the 16:02. Novel. Black Swan 2011.
The Obscure Logic of the Heart. Novel. Black Swan 2011.
Ishq and Mushq. Novel. Black Swan 2008.
Petr Borkovec
Born in 1970, Petr Borkovec is a poet, writer and translator as well as dramaturge at the literary Café Fra in Prague. Critics have singled Borkovec out for his supreme mastery of traditional poetic resources and his precocious development of a distinctive voice that stands out among the successors of the most important poetry of the 20th century, according to Die Zeit as early as 2002. “A young poet from Prague of quiet perfection.”
In his poetry Borkovec gently and laconically chronicles an era of upheaval in the suburbs of Prague. According to Ilma Rakusa, he creates precarious snapshots of daily life and in doing so envelopes the things of this world in a bleak enchantment. Borkovec describes mundane objects and private spaces and simultaneously casts a dissecting eye over Europe’s decaying center: the world appears as an intermediate realm in a state of collapse varnished with distinctive poetic language.
Petr Borkovec held the fifth Dresden Poetic Lectureship on “The Literature of Mitteleuropa” and received a DAAD Berlin Artists Program fellowship in 2004/2005. He has translated poetry of Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky and Yevgeny Rein, among others, as well as plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus.
In cooperation with the German Academy for Language and Literature as part of the Europe in Poems – Grand Tour.
From the Interior. Translated by Justin Quinn. Poems. Seren 2009.
Christos Chryssopoulos
Born in Athens in 1968, the writer, translator, and photographer, Christos Chryssopoulos studied economics and psychology. He is a member of the European Cultural Parliament and contributes regularly to national and international newspapers. His books have been translated throughout the world. Parthenon is his first work to be translated into German.
In Parthenon Christos Chryssopoulos explores collective imagination and politics by placing a terrorist and in the center of the plot: a young man blows up the Parthenon because he wants to free himself and the Greek people from the inhibiting burden of their overwhelming legacy from antiquity. In his novel, Chryssopoulos reflects on history and the tension between the Greek national identity and the idea of Europe as an independent entity.
In his astute novel he writes not only about the profound ambivalence of the Greeks but also of every national identity. A courageous, powerfully-told novel on the construction of a nation and the poetry of destruction. Contemporary Greek literature is this vibrant. Robert Menasse said of him: “An important Greek voice, a magnificent storyteller. Anyone who wants to understand Europe and see it as his or her homeland must read European literature, and Christos Chryssopoulos is a writer of European stature. This is what literature can do: depict human beings so that we understand – this is how we are! Not we, the Greeks, but we human beings.”
Zoltán Danyi
Zoltán Danyi was born in 1972 to the Hungarian minority community in Senta/Yugoslavia, where he lives today. The dissolution of Yugoslavia is a trauma that struck him and his generation particularly hard because he was twenty years old at the time and therefore eligible to serve in the armed forces. He was able to avoid conscription because he was studying philosophy and literature in the Hungarian city of Szeged, but what happened in his country left him distraught.
As a Hungarian Serb, he was constantly confronted with the question of who or what he actually stood for. His circumstances protected from nationalistic mania and turned him into a distant, but careful observer. His first novel, Der Kadaverräumer (The Corpse-clearers), explores the continued effects of violence and how these after-effects can destroy victims of violence. Danyi shows that nationalist aggression, armed violence and the entire insanity of murder can be understood as mischanneled aggression. This novel, therefore, is not about ideologies but about physicality.
“Trauma is the impossibility of narration,” wrote Aleida Assmann in her habilitation thesis Spaces of Memory. Traumatic experiences, Assmann writes, disrupt chronological order, evade interpretive processing and thus also evade verbalization. How can one tell the story of war trauma? In his poetic and challenging debut novel, Zoltán Danyi sends a nameless man on an odyssey in his own mind.
Zoltán Danyi and his German translator Terézia Mora have been nominated for the International Literature Prize of the House of World Cultures for Der Kadaverräumer.
Elisa Shua Dusapin
Born in 1993 in southwestern France, Elisa Shua Dusapin is the daughter of a Korean mother and a French father. She arrived in Switzerland at the age of five and became a Swiss citizen at thirteen. She studied at the Literary Institute in Biel and has worked as an actor and theater assistant. Between trips to East Asia, she lives in the Jura.
Her novel, Ein Winter in Sokcho (A Winter in Sokcho),, takes place in a port and beach resort, somewhat forlorn in the off-season, on the South Korean coast on the border with North Korea. A South Korean student is working as a girl Friday in a rather run-down guest house and there she meets a French illustrator in town on a search for inspiration for his next comic book. Whereas he is seeking out quiet and local color, she wants to escape. Gently, tenderly fashioned and distilled to the essentials, Elisa Shua Dusapin’s narrative describes the encounter of two very different figures. With each conversation, each walk through the wintery nowhere-land, the two grow closer. They are two castaways who long for a fresh start, towards which each of them ventures in his or her own way.
Elisa Shua Dusapin has written a captivating novel filled with reflections on resistant exteriors and interiors that are difficult to access, and done so in a laconic, wintry style that avoids psychologizing and leaves lots of space between the lines.
Together with her translator Andreas Jandl, Elisa Shua Dusapin will present her novel Ein Winter in Sokcho (A Winter in Sokcho),.
In cooperation with the CTL (Literary Translation Center).
Theresia Enzensberger
Theresia Enzensberger was born in 1986. She grew up in Munich, studied film and film studies in New York and currently works as a freelance journalist, commentator, and columnist for major German newspapers. She lives in Berlin.
Her debut novel Blaupause (Blueprint), tells the story of a young Bauhaus student at the beginning of the bubbling 1920s. Luise Schilling is young, hungry for knowledge, and with a great future ahead of her. She studies with professors like Gropius or Kandinsky and throws herself into the dreams and ideas of the age. Between technology and art, Communism and the avant-garde, populism and the youth movement, Luise gets to know social utopias whose influence on us can still be seen today. Theresia Enzensberger’s fast-paced and extremely topical novel tells the story of a young woman in the throes of life, of conflicts, and of mostly futile struggles against patriarchal structures.
Essentially, her novel is a plea to the present. It challenges the reader to recognizes the dangers that threaten a just, equal, and democratic society not only on its margins, but through the contradictions at its center. This recognition may be obvious, yet it is more relevant than ever. The critic Richard Kämmerlings called Theresia Enzensberger’s novel Blaupause a successful combination of an “historical college novel” and a “female artist novel.”
“Perspectives” conversation series
Karl-Markus Gauss
Karl-Markus Gauss was born in Salzburg in 1954, where he still lives and works as a writer and publisher of the literary journal Literatur und Kritik. Many people seek adventure in faraway places. In his most recent work, Abenteuerliche Reise durch mein Zimmer (Adventurous Journeys in my Room), Karl-Markus Gauss, cartographer of Europe’s margins, finds adventure close to home. He sets off on a journey for which he doesn’t even need to leave his room and leads us through various countries and eras. Whether he is writing about his bed, his grandmother’s handwritten cookbook, an old steamer trunk, or a letter opener once owned by the Moravian industrialist Hans Hatschek, he always praises mundane objects and through them he discovers the variety and richness of the world. We learn of courageous and singular individuals from distant regions and unknown nationalities and, of course, of the author’s own partialities. Karl-Markus Gauss leads on a charming and entertainingly instructive expedition in the unknown terrain of private life.
The land through which we will travel is introduced to us on the very first page. The space is well-defined but no borders are drawn. What Karl-Markus Gauss has undertaken in his fascinating new book is what the cultural critic Bernd Stiegler has called “traveling standstill”: rooted in place, he explores an entire world.
Claire Genoux
Born in 1971, Claire Genoux has published several novels and collections of poetry including Saisons du corps (Seasons of the Body, 1999), for which she was awarded the C.-F. Ramuz Poetry Prize. After completing her art studies, she taught adult French classes and worked for various publications at home and abroad. She works as a freelance writer in Lausanne and teaches at the Swiss Literary Institute in Biel.
Through her prose and the existential questions it raises, Claire Genoux takes her place in a line that includes the Valais writers S. Corinne Bille and Catherine Colomb. Her most recent volume of poetry is Orpheline (Orphan Girl, 2016) in which she comes to terms with her mother’s death. Denis Maillefer commented on it in Le Matin Dimanche, “Claire Genoux distills the salt from her tears and then patiently orders the grains on paper. The trace that ultimately takes shape is the poem...” Her latest book, the novel Lynx,, is “a magnificent story about the ruptures of childhood and the power of words.” (Anne Pitteloud in Le Courrier de Genève.)
None of Claire Genoux’s works are available in German or in English. A few of her poems have appeared in anthologies and journals, such as five poems in the German-language anthology, Grand Tour – Eine Reise durch die junge Lyrik Europas (Grand Tour - A journey through recent European poetry).
In cooperation with the German Academy for Language and Literature as part of the Europe in Poems – Grand Tour.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London in 1962, where she still lives. She teaches creative writing at universities in England, Germany, and the United States and also writes for television and radio. Winner of the 2002 Spycher Award, Lavinia Greenlaw writes poems, novels, libretti, radio plays, non-fiction books, short stories, sound works, and filmscripts. Greenlaw’s slender volumes of poetry appear in intervals of several years because her distillations of words require a long maturing process. She effortlessly combines elements that sometimes seem incompatible in contemporary poetry: existential urgency and literary elegance, wordplay and profound contents. Her poems evince a modernity that is also an approach to readability.
After years of highly literary productivity, the author consciously weaves together the strands of her work, in Eine Theorie unendlicher Nähe (A Theory of Infinite Proximity), highlighting the qualities that have made it distinctive. These poems recall the meditative calm of Robert Creeley’s verse or John Cage’s music. The reader can share the speaker’s experience as she proceeds through images. We look through a telescope with her, plunge into a painting – and for a moment experience pure presence: as if the body now frameless, space / in which space unfolds, field upon field.
A Theory of Infinite Proximity. Poems. A bilingual edition with German translations by Wiebke Meier. Edition Lyrik Kabinett with Hanser, 2018.
Minsk. Poems. Faber & Faber, 2003.
Durs Grünbein
Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962. In 1985, he moved to East Berlin, where he began studying theater arts. He soon decided to devote himself to writing. He taught himself quantum physics and neurology, as well as philosophy, in particular that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Frankfurt School, and the French structuralists. He currently lives in Berlin and Rome, writing poems and essays and translating.
The contradiction between reality and illusion proved to be a historical event in the collapse of a nation, the GDR, and in the transformation of its society that has continued until the present. In the second section of his new book, Aus der Traum (Kartei) (From the Dream [File]), Grünbein uses the contradictions of freedom and solidarity on the one hand and hatred and division on the other, of Germany and Europe, to develop the idea of a resistance led by the imagination against the fetish of crude reality. A poetry book title could hardly be more provocative and yet the poet leaves no room for doubt on one matter: “On the whole, what we call reality is overrated.” Thus the first section of his book powerfully steers the imagination into the stormy zone of the reality which most believe to be the measure of all things. Collected and ordered under his keywords, we have a notebook that can be profitably opened to any page.
“Perspectives” conversation series
Mortal Diamond. Poems. Translated by Michael Eskin. Upper West Side Philosophers, 2017.
The Vocation of Poetry. Essays. Translated by Michael Eskin. Upper West Side Philosophers, 2011.
Descartes’ Devil: Three Meditations. Translated by Anthea Bell. Upper West Side Philosophers, 2017.
Rolf Hermann
Born in Leuk in 1973, Rolf Hermann studied English and German literature. He paid for his studies working as a shepherd in Simplon. Rolf Hermann is a member of the dialect combo ‘Die Gebirgspoeten’ (The Mountain Poets). He writes poetry, prose, performance texts, and radio plays, often in dialect. A number of his texts, which have been published in journals, anthologies, and collected into five volumes, have been translated into Arabic, English, French, Lithuanian, Polish, and Spanish.
In his collection of stories, Flüchtiges Zuhause (Ephemeral Home), Rolf Hermann looks back at his childhood and adolescence in Valais. These seven stories are small literary pearls, written with great stylistic refinement. With warmth and sureness of touch, he depicts the world of three generations over the course of time in precise, imagistic language. He tells of silent longing, unfulfilled dreams, changing environments, and quiet goodbyes. And of the activities, the things, and people one loves. Duration enriches: writing. In a laudation, Manfred Papst said, “In his writing, Rolf Hermann goes all out. He cultivates the gesture of disappearance. And he knows that all writing comes from solitude.”
Federico Italiano
Born in 1976, Frederico Italiano is a writer, translator, and publisher who lives in Vienna, where he does research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. At the LMU Munich he is a Lecturer in General and Comparative Literature. He has primarily translated modern and contemporary poets (César Vallejo, Philippe Soupault, Vicente Aleixandre, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Lutz Seiler, Jan Wagner, and others) into Italian. His first volume of poetry, Nella costanza, appeared in 2003, soon followed by others, all highly acclaimed and well regarded in Italy.
Frederico Italiano comes from Novara and has lived in German-speaking countries for years. He writes his poetry in linguistic exile – the title of his 2015 volume of poetry is Un esilio perfetto – composing poems in Italian in German-speaking environments. On the fact that his poetry’s resonant space is Italy, he says, “I feel like a kind of forward post. Writing, for me, is like throwing. I first have to throw my words over the Alps.”
Together with his German colleague Jan Wagner, he has edited the anthology Grand Tour – Eine Reise durch die junge Lyrik Europas (Grand Tour - A journey through recent European poetry).
In cooperation with the German Academy for Language and Literature as part of the Europe in Poems – Grand Tour.
Andreas Jandl
Born in 1975, Andreas Jandl studied theater arts, English and Romance studies in Berlin, London, and Montreal. He has worked as a freelance translator from French and English since 2000. He lives in Berlin. Along with plays and young adult literature, he primarily translates literary essays and novels by J. A. Baker, Nicolas Dickner, David Diop, Mike Kenney, Marie-Renée Lavoie, Robert Macfarlane, and Gaétan Soucy. In 2017, he and Frank Sievers were awarded the Christoph-Martin-Wieland Translation Prize for their rendition of The Peregrine by John Alec Baker. From the laudation: “Not a single word too many, not one in the wrong place. It is not possible to translate more precisely, more poetically.”
Together with Elisa Shua Dusapin, Andreas Jandl will present her novel Ein Winter in Sokcho (A Winter in Sokcho), which he has translated from French into German.
In cooperation with the CTL (Literary Translation Center).
Pedro Lenz
Pedro Lenz (born 1965) is one of the most important voices in Swiss dialect literature. His 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. Since 2001, he has worked full time as a writer, penning columns for various newspapers and magazines. He also writes for various theater groups as well as the Swiss radio station SRF.
His subject matter is not the ‘literary high culture’ of the critics, but daily life, people in the working world with their longings and dreams for their free time. He lends voices to those whose lives have not worked out. The results are tragic, bleak, but also uplifting stories of everyday life.
Pedro Lenz’s novel in dialect, Der Goalie bin ig (Naw Much of a Talker), has made him one of Switzerland’s most successful authors. This best-selling novel has not only won many awards and been adapted to the stage but was also made into a film and – although it is written in dialect – has been translated into six languages.
With Der Liebgott isch ke Gränzwächter (Our Dear Lord is not a Border Guard), Lenz offers us a collection of forty-four columns – clever, open-minded, and humorous.
Naw Much of a Talker. Novel. Translated into Scots by Donal McLaughlin. Freight Books, 2014.
Frances Leviston
Frances Leviston was born in Edinburgh in 1982. She studied creative writing and now works as a freelance writer in Durham and teaches in the University of Manchester’s Creative Writing Program.
Frances Leviston has published two volumes of poetry: Public Dream (2007), which was nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Disinformation (2015), which was on the shortlist of the International Dylan Thomas Award.
Her poetry evinces a rare seriousness and exceptional skill. She has mastered poetic forms with technical dexterity. Complicated and concentrated verse appears effortless under Frances Leviston’s pen. Her language is lively and vibrant. For her, poetry is more a kind of knowledge than a proverbial response to a long-settled case. Frances Leviston, who has an unusually distinct voice, was influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, as is evident in her poem “Bishop in Louisiana”. Asked by the Financial Times what it means to her to be a poet, she answered, “Something different with every poem; but fundamentally it means treating language as something with a life of its own – not a tool to be used, but an intelligence to be collaborated with.”
In cooperation with the German Academy for Language and Literature as part of the Europe in Poems – Grand Tour.
Disinformation. Poems. Picador, 2015.
Public Dream. Poems. Picador, 2007.
Johanna Lier
Johanna Lier was born in 1962 and began her artistic career as an actress. She became famous for her role as the daughter Belli in the Fredi Murer film Alpine Fire. She later changed her sights to literature, composed several volumes of poetry and theater plays. She currently lives in Zurich and works as a poet, university lecturer and journalist. She has spent extended periods of time doing research in Iran, Nigeria, Chile, Ukraine, Israel, and Argentinia.
In Johanna Lier’s most recent novel, Wie die Milch aus dem Schaf kommt (How Milk Comes from Sheep), the protagonist Selma Einzig travels to Thurgau, Ukraine, and Israel after an unexpected discovery in her grandmother’s legacy. Her journey is actually one of self-discovery. The fabrication of memories, the spinning of yarns, the exploration of the present and chance acquaintances – an intriguing way to fill holes in one’s past. This autobiographically inspired family story tells of vagabonds without means or identification who, as refugees, found a noodle factory in Western Switzerland. It is the account of a trip to the south and east. In the abysses of past, a section of industrial history is interwoven with migration history in 19th century Switzerland. A search for one’s own past that remains very ambivalent and is now and again accompanied by a sense of unsettling discomfort.
Tanja Maljartschuk
Tanja Maljartschuk was born in 1983 and grew up in Ukraine, where she worked for several years as a journalist. She has published several books. She writes regular columns for the Deutsche Welle (Ukraine) and for Zeit Online. She has lived in Vienna for a number of years. In 2018, she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her first work written in German.
In her most recent novel, Blauwal der Erinnerung (The Great Blue Whale of Memory), she writes about the Ukrainian folk hero Vyacheslav Lypynsky, whose life she artfully connects to that of the first-person narrator. The narrator searches for traces of his past in order to better come to terms with her own present. Lypynsky was historically and politically engaged with Ukraine, divided at the time between Poland and Russia, and he was almost obsessive in his calls for national independence. As sickly as this historical figure was and searching – like Lypynsky – for affiliation, the narrator tracks this proud, uncompromising, hypochondriac man in order to confront her Soviet uprooting through memory. This impressive literary novel portrays the consequences of having one’s own identity formed by fear, obedience, and forgetting.
The Frankfurter Rundschau said of this book: “This novel consoles in its very inconsolability. The great blue whale closes its mouth and swims on.”
Petros Markaris
Petros Markaris was born in 1937 in Istanbul to an Armenian entrepreneur father and a Greek mother. He grew up there and attended a German school. As a result, Markaris speaks and writes in Greek, Turkish, and German. He has lived in Athens for a long time.
Markaris has written several theater plays, created a popular Greek television crime series and co-authored movies with the film-maker Theo Angelopoulos. In addition, he translates German plays into Greek. After he began writing crime novels in the mid-1990s, he became internationally renowned.
For more than twenty years he has collaborated with the acclaimed director Theo Angelopoulos. In his journal entitled Tagebuch einer Ewigkeit (Diary of an Infinity), Markaris offers a view into the creation of the film Eternity and a Day. With spirit and deep affection, he recounts his collaboration with his close friend, their walks, and their discussions of books, films, and casts. The conversations between the two show how humor and seriousness both played roles in the creative process – and how literature and great film are made. This authentic documentation includes previously unpublished photographs from the set, a foreword by Theo Angelopoulos, and an afterword by the author written exclusively for the German edition.
Deadline in Athens: An Inspector Costas Haritos Mystery. Novel. Translated by David Connolly. Grove Press, 2004.
Che Committed Suicide. Novel. Translated by David Connolly. Eurocrime, 2009.
Late Night News. Novel. Translated by David Connolly. Vintage Books, 2010.
Francesca Melandri
Francesca Melandri was born in Rome in 1964 and first became known as an author of film and television scripts. Her first novel, Eva schläft (Eve Sleeps), brought her to the attention of a large German-language readership. Her second novel, Über Meereshöhe (Above Sea Level), was acclaimed as a masterpiece by Italian critics.
In her third book, Alle, ausser mir (Everyone but Me), Melandri engages with Italy’s often suppressed terrible colonial history. Fascist colonial politics in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) did not shy away from racial laws and mass murder. The author recounts this forgotten history as a family epic, centered on the Roman teacher Ilaria, who suddenly no longer understands the world. A young man from Ethiopia arrives and claims to be her father’s grandson. Layer upon layer of family secrets are finally exposed. Ilaria must engage with current refugee policies as well with the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. These entanglements throw a new light on still smoldering feuds and on Europe’s responsibility for the current refugee crisis.
Francesca Melandri convincingly describes the deterioration of public debate and draws a connection between Berlusconi’s vulgarity, the indifference towards history and the abandonment of humanistic ideals.
Eve Sleeps. Translated by Katherine Gregor. Novel. Europa Editions, 2016.
Eman Mohammed Turki
Eman Mohammed Turki was born in Amman. After studying mass communications, she worked in the media, primarily as a cultural journalist. She was Editor in Chief of the journal Al Rajul Al Youm and wrote for various newspapers in the United Arab Emirates. In addition, she wrote international reports for Agence France-Presse (AFP). She currently works as Chief of Communications for the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi.
Eman Mohammed Turki has published two volumes of poetry, En Ghabat Al Sidra Wa En Ebtada Al Bahr (When the Sidra was Absent, the Sea Became Distant) and Ghorfa Muwareba (Illusive Room). Most recently, one of her poems appeared in the Abu Dhabi-based play Hetrotopia Abu Dhabi by the Japanese director Akira Takayama.
Eman Mohammed Turki and Mariam Al-Saedi will read newly translated work in Leukerbad und will speak with Nora Amin about the situation of women writers in the Arab world.
Gianna Molinari
Gianna Molinari was born in 1988, studied at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel and at the University of Lausanne. She currently lives in Zurich where she co-founded an artists’ activist group, Literatur für das, was passiert (Literature for what is happening), to help refugees.
In her debut novel, Hier ist noch alles möglich (Here Everything is Still Possible), an unnamed narrator takes us with her into a factory on the edge of town. As a night security guard who has erased all traces of her own life up until then, she surveys the gradually emptying factory as it is decommissioned. A wolf is reported to have slipped through a hole in the fence surrounding the property. In this non-place, stuck somewhere between the past and the future, the wolf becomes the engine of her existence and her search for it, her support. Gianna Molinari’s unpretentious language captures this dismal world, a language devoid of foreign words, subordinate clauses, embellishments, or glitter. Molinari has pared each sentence down to its core and developed a unique sound that keeps you reading. Perhaps also because she never makes the wolf a central character – as fairy tales do – but only follows the young woman. At night she patrols the empty factory and watches the surveillance cameras; during the day she searches for traces of the wolf. But the animal remains invisible and as mysterious as its tracker.
Gianna Molinari will face the translators in this year's translation colloquium.
Terézia Mora
Terézia Mora was born in Hungary in 1971 and grew up bilingual in a small village near the Austrian-Hungarian border. She has described her childhood as a German-Hungarian in the archaic, poverty-stricken world of such villages as formative. She studied in Berlin, where she now lives with her family and where has worked since 1988 as a freelance author and translator of such writers as Zoltán Danyi.
In her novels and stories, Terézia Mora focuses her attention on outsiders and the homeless, people leading precarious existences or in search of something, and in doing so, Mora hits a nerve of our era. She is unsparing in her examination of the forlornness of big city nomads and she plumbs the abysses of inner and outer estrangement. She does this suggestively and with force; her writing is rich in imagery and tension – with accents of irony, iridescent allusions, and analytical precision. Time, fleeting, wasted, irrecoverable, and never sufficient – is an elementary part of the stories in her new collection, Die Die Liebe unter Aliens. (Love Among Aliens). In addition, the vision of another possible and perhaps better world subtly appears. In an eminently artistic fashion, Mora transforms particularities of the present into her characters and inserts utopian moments in her narratives. She writes about misfortune but avoids sentimentality. She writes about eccentrics but without absurdity. Her narrative art is masterful.
With Der Kadaverräumer (The Corpse-clearers), Terézia Mora and Zoltán Danyi have been nominated for the International Literature Prize of the House of World Cultures.
Day in, Day out. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Novel. Harper Perennial, 2007.
Adolf Muschg
Born in 1934, Adolf Muschg has written a youthfully slender and wonderfully complex novel called Heimkehr nach Fukushima (Homecoming to Fukushima). It is very readable even though it is about finality and the love story it recounts is so unbelievable, readers are only too happy to believe it.
The Fukushima disaster is not yet overcome, on the contrary, yet Japan would like to suppress it. In Muschg’s new novel, the German writer Paul Neuhaus accepts the invitation from a Japanese couple he has befriended to visit them in their homeland regardless of the dangers. Neuhaus, a former architect, will be the first in a series of new settlers in the evacuated area. The state would like the less contaminated area around the core reactor to be re-inhabited and is promoting this project with exemplary artistic communities.
Paul Neuhaus and his Japanese guide meet a man who feeds and waters the abandoned cattle even though they are no longer useful. “Perhaps the end started long ago, we just didn’t notice; and it not nearly as painful as we’d imagined,” he says.
Celine Koffka wrote about Homecoming to Fukushima in the Mannheimer Morgen: “Muschg’s novel renders the nuclear disaster and life following it tangible in a way that news reports cannot.” His novel is also an introduction to the Japanese culture and way of life along with a documentary account of daily life in which a Geiger counter is more important than a clock.
The Blue Man and Other Stories. Translated by Marlis Zeller Cambon and Michael Hamburger. George Braziller Publishers, 1985.
Madame Nielsen
Madame Nielsen was born Claus Beck-Nielsen in Danish Jutland in 1963. He moved to New York in the 1990s, where he joined a performance group. In 2000, he began living as Claus Nielsen on the streets and without identity papers. In 2001, he declared Claus Nielsen dead and became Madame Nielsen some years later. Since 2013, he has been writing novels under this name.
Every bit as dazzling, endlessly meandering, and elusive as the author is her latest book to be translated into German, Der endlose Sommer (The Endless Summer). A small group of people playing for love, friendship and art are thrown out of time into an endless summer in which everything seems possible and fateful. Even more essential to The Endless Summer than the story is Madame Nielsen’s style and what it elicits in the reader. Form is not just a means to an end. Form and content are congruent. Just as the story is misty and dreamlike for long stretches, so is the style, which opens up to those readers who bring their complete attention to the book.
Madame Nielsen is uncompromising towards the reader. Her main intention is not to tell a story. She leaves the reader many empty spaces, introduces characters who seem mere sketches, in a work that is not concerned with order or chronology. What is most essential is art. The Endless Summer is a literary, a written performance.
In cooperation with the DAAD Berlin.
The Endless Summer. Translated by Gaye Kynoch. Novel. Open Letter, 2018.
Alan Pauls
The Argentinian novelist, essayist, critic, and scriptwriter Alan Pauls was born in Buenos Aires in 1959. He studied literature, became a lecturer in literary theory and works as a newspaper editor. He gained international renown for his fourth novel, Die Vergangenheit (The Past), adapted to film under the same title. He lives in Buenos Aires.
In his trilogy, Pauls engages directly with the past, specifically with the 1970s military dictatorship in Argentina. Against the backdrop of the ideological conflicts in the 1970s, his novel, Geschichte der Tränen (A History of Tears), portrays the intellectual and spiritual development of the educated son of a progressive middle-class family. It centers on the young protagonist’s confrontation with his peers and the formative events of the era. In his novel, Geschichte der Haare (A History of Hair), we gradually come to understand that one’s hair style is not only an existential question for the rich and famous, but is rooted deep in the soul and therefore serves as particularly well as a prism through which to view an era in which a generation is bound together through their hopes, attitudes, and failures. In the third novel, Geschichte des Geldes (A History of Money), the narrator must always pay in the end – in every respect. There are debts, for which no one assumes responsibility, absurd investments, and secret deals in this intense and urgent look at human loss and secret economies.
The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño called Alan Pauls “one of the best living Latin American writers.”
In cooperation with the DAAD Berlin.
Antoinette Rychner
Born in Switzerland in 1979, Antoinette Rychner first studied theater arts, then at the Swiss Institute of Literature. She worked in several theaters in Romandie before she began writing theater plays.
Der Preis (The Prize) is a modern artist novel, subtle and incisive and filled with unusual imagery. A sculptor with the consuming ambition to finally win a prize experiences the affliction of all artists: he has too little time, too little calm, and too little power to control the creative process. He imagines everything would be better if others weren’t around, that is, his family, his wife S., Tyke and Tyketwo, who make too many demands and too much noise and whose lovableness gets in the way of his seriously fulfilling his vocation. But the muse’s call is relentless and until he has won the prize, the sculptor cannot be happy. Ultimately, though, he must ask himself what exactly will be won with this prize. How do you measure success? And when are you actually who you want to be? The Prize is a critical examination of the struggle for recognition and the artist’s self-conception. Utterly free of kitsch, this is a clever novel about willpower, time, daily life, hope, and love.
Géraldine Schwarz
Géraldine Schwarz was born in Strasbourg in 1974 to a French mother and a German father. A writer, documentary filmmaker, and journalist, she moved to Germany to work as an AFP correspondent and now lives in Berlin.
In her book Die Gedächtnislosen (The Amnesiacs), Géraldine Schwarz presents an interesting thesis: the manner in which the continent has grappled with its past after the Second World War can be used to explain the right-wing populist currents in Europe. Schwarz interweaves her own French-German family history with world history: we learn how her grandfather, who had acquired a Jewish firm in the course of Aryanization, refused to offer compensation to the only survivor of the family, all but one of whose members were murdered in Auschwitz. Schwarz’s maternal grandfather had worked with the Vichy regime as a police officer and helped search out Jews in razzias. The differences in the way countries have dealt with the own histories are obvious: whereas in Germany fellow traveling and complicity were dominant themes, in France they were extensively suppressed. The Amnesiacs is a very personal work of memory in the culture of remembrance. In this book, with exemplary care and attention, Schwarz calls for a continuation of using the work of memory to counter populist and nationalistic tendencies. Its message is anything but new yet alarmingly topical.
“Perspectives” conversation series
Vladimir Sorokin
Born in 1955, Vladimir Sorokin is considered the most important contemporary Russian writer. Sorokin is one of the sharpest critics of Russia’s political elites and is regular subjected to attacks by groups loyal to the regime.
His most recent novel,Manaraga. Tagebuch eines Meisterkochs (Manaraga: Journal of a Master Chef), is a wild ride through trash and world literature. It is bursting with exuberant language, staggering comedy, and graceful insidiousness.
Well into the 21st century, bibliomaniacs do not devour Gorky, Proust, and Thomas Mann with their eyes, but offer them to the flames. Printed works of world literature are the grilling charcoal of the future and the essential element of a new cuisine called “book ‘n’ grill.”
This novel is also a biting commentary on the current global condition, on European malaise in general and the Russian disaster in particular as Sorokin’s books have already been publicly burned by rabid Putin followers. Now and again, Sorokin gives his colleague Houellebecq a mocking wink, since he is by far more entertaining as a prophet of doom than the French writer.
The narrator of this “journal” is Géza, a master in the elite, but illegal profession of grilling over a fire of books, and he specializes in Russian literature. He jets around the globe as a “master chef” and burns only valuable printed matter. He earns enormous sums and has a great time, in Switzerland, too, and burns a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Leukerbad of all places.
Day of the Oprichnik. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Ice Trilogy. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
The Queue. Translated by Sally Laird. Novel. New York Review Books, 2008.
Ré Soupault
Ré Soupault was born as Erna Niemeyer in Pomerania in 1901 and died in Paris in 1996. When still a student she worked with the avantgarde artist Viktor Eggeling at the Bauhaus in Weimar on his experimental film ‘Diagonal Symphonie’. She was shaped by her student years in Weimar. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer were her teachers.
Stubbornness, energy, and countless ideas made possible her perhaps most ambitious project: her own fashion studio in Paris after she had gained experience drawing in a fashion studio in Berlin after the Weimar Bauhaus was closed in 1925.
Her path took her from Bauhaus Weimar to the metropolises of Berlin and Paris and in the latter into the very heart of Surrealism. Tunisia, Latin America and North America, Switzerland, and finally a return to Paris were stations on the life journey of this modern nomad, who was always creatively involved with new life situations, always leaving everything behind to begin anew.
After 1946 she also worked as a translator (of, among others, André Breton and Philippe Soupault) and as a writer for radio. She is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.
Ré Soupault’s photographs were rediscovered only in the late 1980s. Some of her photographs will be on display in the Alten Galerie St. Laurent during the Leukerbad Literature Festival.
Aleš Šteger
Born in 1973 in Ptuj, Yugoslavia, Aleš Šteger is probably the best-known Slovenian poet, writer, editor, translator, and journalist. He completed his studies in Ljubljana, where he currently lives. He has received many awards for his poetry, which have been translated and published in literary journals throughout the world. Two years ago, he became a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts.
Once a year, Aleš Šteger works on a Logbuch der Gegenwart (Logbook of the Present), in which he describes a place over the course of twelve hours – Mexico, India or Fukushima. He wrote his new volume of poetry, Über dem Himmel unter der Erde (Above the Sky Under the Ground), after a trip to Japan. The result is a kind of poetic meditation very close to classical haiku. His simple, concentrated, and rhythmic poems fascinate with their glowing colors, their precision, and close observation. The way this Slovenian poet laconically and without gimmickry initiates a metaphysical continuum, unites the heavenly and the human, speech and silence, history and the present is powerful and, above all, authentic. The effortless, almost nonchalant gaze of Šteger’s poetry is as striking as his carefully inserted philosophical insights are inspiring. Marica Bodrozic has written of his poetry: “Finally we have someone who refreshes poetry intellectually and writes poems in which grace and the inevitable find their place and are given room to breathe...”
In Leukerbad, Aleš Šteger will also appear accompanied by the accordion player Jure Tori.
In cooperation with the German Academy for Language and Literature as part of the Europe in Poems – Grand Tour.
The Book of Things. Translated by Brian Henry. Poems. BOA Editions, 2010.
Maria Stepanova
Maria Stepanova was born in Moscow in 1972. In her novel Nach dem Gedächtnis (Post-Memory), she follows the traces of her Jewish ancestors far back in history. This family history is shaped and determined by the course of time in the late 19th and 20th centuries: the pogroms under the czarist regime, the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and the incitement of hatred against Jews under Stalin.
How memory functions and what does it want from me: this is one of the typical reversals that Maria Stepanova pursues in Post-Memory. She often seems to be observing from behind, from a rear view. Does memory want something from us? Post-memory, according to Maria Stepanova, “also alters the present: it turns the presence of the past into a key for daily life.” It seems to her – in another surprising reversal – as if “you can only love the past because you are sure it will not return.” When readers open the book, they feel, surprised and fascinated, that the book is talking about them; of how, say, they have emptied their parents’ apartment; of the sense of responsibility and powerlessness they feel faced by all the eloquent objects: tattered piano sheet music, broken kitchen appliances, yellowed children’s drawings, boxes of illegible letters.
Maria Stepanova has invented an irresistible form of literature, a collage of autobiographical narration, biographical research, and culturological essay.
(Based on the review of Nach dem Gedächtnis written by Barbara Villiger Heilig, published in Republik on 26.11.2018.)
Christian Uetz
Born in Egnach on Lake Constance in 1963, Christian Uetz is a trained philosopher who does not believe in any truth outside of language. Whether in poetry or prose, his dance on the margins is always simultaneously a tightrope walk over the abysses of existence. And he is considered a virtuoso with regard to the intensity of language. In public appearances, he recites his texts at a tremendous speed that defies his audience’s comprehension. This is intentional: all that counts is the power of words and a sentence’s power of suggestion, not its contents.
In his collection of poetry, Engel der Illusion (Angel of Illusion), he has playfully yet confidently composed poems on important topics: on the other in oneself, on presence and absence, on negativity and transcendence. His poems are rich in imagery, selfless, and at the same time profoundly reflective. In them, Christian Uetz explores language for the hidden presence of this angel of illusion, in order to make her appearance visible and tangible. What his writing displays are the ecstasies of desire and the intoxication of reason, the insanity of the day. Its vanishing point is always a captivating affirmation of life and sensuality, a celebration of language as the power that makes illusion recognizable as truth and makes what is beyond recognizable as part of the here and now.
Aglaja Veteranyi
Born in Bucharest in 1962, Aglaja Veteranyi died in Zurich in 2002. She came from a family or Romanian circus artists: her father was a clown, her mother an acrobat. The family fled Romania in 1967. In the following years, Aglaja Veteranyi had to perform as a circus artist and dancer. Her family traveled throughout western Europe, Africa, and South America and so Aglaja Veteranyi was unable to attend school. She was illiterate. The family settled in Switzerland in 1977 and Aglaja Veteranyi learned to speak and write German. She graduated with a degree in acting from the Schauspiel Gemeinschaft Zürich, where she later taught. She wrote novels, short stories, poems, and plays. Her works, especially her autobiographical writing about her difficult childhood, were highly praised by critics and quickly became enormous successes.
In the midst of a psychological crisis in 2002, Aglaja Veteranyi took her own life. During her brief creative period, she filled countless notebooks and pieces of scrap paper with writing. She constantly crossed out, corrected, and rewrote her texts. She left behind a considerable number of unpublished writings, which have been selected and published in two volumes along with some of her newspaper articles: Café Papa. Fragmente. (Café Papa: Fragments) and Wörter statt Möbel. Fundstücke (Words Instead of Furniture: Finds).
Aglaja Veteranyi’s texts will be read at the Leukerbad Literature Festival by Tanja Maljartschuk, Pedro Lenz, and Rolf Hermann.
Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta. Translated by Vincent Kling. Novel. Dalkey Archive, 2012.
Jan Wagner
Born in Hamburg in 1971, Jan Wagner is a poet, essayist, and publisher as well as a translator of English-language poetry (by Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, Jo Shapcott, and Robin Robertson, among others. He has lived in Berlin since 1995.
The taz said of his writing: “Jan Wagner is a traveler in the Romantic tradition, a traveler who sees the ‘modest’ things before him: ‘there was a now, and there was a here.’ Wagner observes the world with the awareness of someone who not only knows, but appreciates the fact that the world exists without him and will continue to do so.” The FAZ calls him a “high-wire artist of form,” because he commands traditional poetic forms without allowing himself to be constrained by them.
Aside from his own writing, Jan Wagner has edited an impressive number of comprehensive anthologies. Among these, co-edited with his Italian colleague, Federico Italiano, is Grand Tour – Eine Reise durch die junge Lyrik Europas (Grand Tour - A journey through recent European poetry).
In cooperation with the German Academy for Language and Literature as part of the Europe in Poems – Grand Tour.
The Art of Topiary. Translated by David Keplinger. Poems. Milkweed Editions, 2017.
Nell Zink
Nell Zink was born in California in 1964 and was raised in rural Virginia. She began writing as a teenager, had a deep interest in birds and nature, and read a great deal. She studied philosophy and then worked in various jobs. Out of conviction Nell Zink lives as an outsider. She keeps her distance from the literary scene to prevent being influenced or co-opted. She currently lives in Bad Belzig, south of Berlin, about which she said that if you’re poor you have to be in Germany and if you’re rich you can survive in America.
In her new novel Mislaid, Peggy flees her failing marriage, takes her blonde daughter with her, and goes underground, having adopted an African-American persona, and moves into an empty house in a small town in Virginia. In this dark, fast-paced and sharp-tongued comedy, Nell Zink lampoons American society’s fundamental contradictions in race, class, gender, and sexuality by examining, for example, how ready a world is to believe someone is black – despite all external appearances.
It is a delight to watch this firework display of a book as it burns. Yet it is also moving, thoughtful, and skeptical book – and therefore unmistakably the work of the Janus-faced Nell Zink.
The Wallcreeper. Novel. Dorothy, a publishing project, 2014.
Mislaid. Novel. Ecco, 2015.
Private Novelist. Novellas. Ecco, 2016.
Nicotine. Novel. Ecco, 2017.