Katja Lange-Müller
Germany
The writer Katja Lange-Müller was born in East Berlin in 1951. At sixteen she was expelled from school for “unsocialist behavior.” She completed an apprenticeship in typography before studying at the Johannes R. Becher literary institute in Leipzig. She left the GDR in 1984. Lange-Müller is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature, the Berlin Academy of the Arts, and she co-founded PEN Berlin in 2022.
Katja Lange-Müller’s latest novel Unser Ole (Our Ole) explores rejections by mothers, the secret desire for affection, and all those lies in life that may sometimes not be lies at all. The former great beauty Ida, now elderly, loses her apartment and moves in with her friend Elvira, who is taking care of her cognitively disabled grandson Ole and she suddenly becomes part of a much greater story. In her distinctive style, Lange-Müller recounts a horrifying mother-daughter story that results in the birth of a brain-damaged infant. “This drama conceals a social critique of the GDR, particularly of its representations of the family and motherhood,” says the FAZ. A family story with all its psychological wounds slowly unfolds in the pages of Katja Lange-Müller’s novel.
Unser Ole. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2024
Das Problem als Katalysator: Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. Lectures. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2018
Drehtür. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2016
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