Julia Weber

Switzerland

Julia Weber

Born in Moshi, Tanzania in 1963, Julia Weber came to Switzerland with her family as a two-year-old. After finishing school and an apprenticeship, she studied at the Swiss Literary Institute in Biel from 2009 to 2012. Her 2017 debut novel Immer ist alles schön (Everything is Always Beautiful), won several literary awards and was shortlisted for the Swiss Book Prize. Julia Weber is a co-founder of the action group “Literatur für das, was passiert” ( Literature for What’s Happening), which supports refugees, and is also a co-founder of the writers’ collective RAUF, which advocates for the visibility of women in the literary publishing. Weber also writes columns for the Tages-Anzeiger, radio broadcasts for SRF1, and plays for the Munich Kammerspiele. She lives in Zurich with her husband, Heinz Helle, and their two children.

While working on her second novel in 2021, Julia Weber became pregnant. This second pregnancy thrust the novelist, as she has said in an interview, into an “existential crisis.” This was grounded primarily in the worry that, with two children, she would no longer be able to fulfill equally well her duties as a mother and as a socially and politically engaged author. Her worry bore literary fruit. In 2022, she published her autofictional work Die Vermengung (The Mixture), about “motherhood and creating art”. Yet this novel is about more than just that: Julia Weber has succeeded in mixing literary characters with her real life. Its sophisticated flickering between fiction and reality unites its disparate narrative stances.


Die Vermengung. Roman. Limmat 2022
Immer ist alles schön. Roman. Limmat 2017

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28th Leukerbad International Literary Festival: 6.21.–23.2024