Authors
Appearing in the 25th Leukerbad
International Literary Festival:
Emily Artmann, Austria
Priya Basil, Germany/Great Britain
Shida Bazyar, Germany
Yari Bernasconi, Switzerland
Martin Bieri, Switzerland
Romain Buffat, Switzerland
Laura Di Corcia, Switzerland
Sasha Filipenko, Belarus
Angélica Freitas, Brazil
Rebecca Gisler, Switzerland
Dana Grigorcea, Switzerland
Jürg Halter, Switzerland
Volha Hapeyeva, Belarus
Rolf Hermann, Switzerland
Alexandre Hmine, Switzerland
Lukas Maisel, Switzerland
Jakub Małecki, Poland
Patrícia Melo, Switzerland/Brazil
Eva Menasse, Germany
Sharon Dodua Otoo, Germany
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Kenya
Anna Prizkau, Germany
Monika Rinck, Germany
D.A.F. de Sade, France
Joachim Sartorius, Germany
Christoph Simon, Switzerland
Marina Skalova, Switzerland
Michelle Steinbeck, Switzerland
Raphael Urweider, Switzerland
Peter Weber, Switzerland
Gabriela Zehnder, Switzerland
Tribute to H.C. Artmann with
Emily Artmann, Austria
Christian Thanhäuser, Austria
Raphael Urweider, Switzerland
“Perspectives” conversations
Ursi Anna Aeschbacher, Switzerland
Priya Basil, Germany/Great Britain
Lukas Bärfuss, Switzerland
Martin Bieri, Switzerland
Monika Bütler, Switzerland
Marie Fleury, Switzerland
Ruth Gantert, Switzerland
Jürg Halter, Switzerland
Patrícia Melo, Switzerland
Camille Luscher, Switzerland
Jonas Lüscher, Switzerland
Monika Rinck, Germany
Angelika Salvisberg, Switzerland
Franziska Schutzbach, Switzerland
Klaus Theweleit, Germany
Michael Thumann, Germany
Joseph Vogl, Germany
Martin Zingg, Switzerland
Emily Artmann
Emily Artmann, born in Salzburg in 1975, studied ethnology and later switched to film studies, which she completed at the Vienna Film Academy. She is responsible for the dramaturgy and editing of numerous cinema documentaries and feature films. In addition, Emily Artmann works on her film and photography projects. She lives in Vienna with her husband and child.
The documentary der wackelatlas – sammeln und jagen mit H.C. Artmann was created from conversations Emily Artmann and her cousin Katharina Copony had with H.C. Artmann shortly before his death. It is not “about the man behind the art”, but decidedly about art and how the human moves within it. The wackelatlas is a highly controlled work, economical in its means, concentrated on its center, as Stefan Grissemann notes.
It is only late in life that Emily Artmann began to write herself in 2019. In einem Mantel aus Fischhaut (In a Coat of Fish Skin) is her first volume of poetry.
In Leukerbad, Emily Artmann will read from her poems and, together with Christian Thanhäuser and Raphael Urweider, conduct the homage to her father H.C. Artmann.
In einem Mantel aus Fischhaut. Poems. Edition Thanhäuser 2021
Lukas Bärfuss
Born in Thun in 1971, Lukas Bärfuss is a playwright, novelist, and essayist. His plays have been performed throughout the world and his novels have been translated into almost twenty languages. He lives and works in Zürich.
More than almost any other Swiss author, Lukas Bärfuss has had enormous public resonance beyond the borders of Switzerland. He has made a name for himself as a critical thinker, a brilliant speaker, and an engaged and uncompromising commentator on the political and social situation. For this he was justifiably recognized with the prestigious Büchner Prize in 2019. He is one of those writers who regularly address societal issues.
With his 2019 book, Malinois, a collection of short stories written over the past two decades, Lukas Bärfuss demonstrates that he is a first-class storyteller. In a style that is at once sensuous and analytical, he writes of people who are suddenly ripped from their mundane routines and in doing so he explores how we encounter each other and what patterns influence the stories of our desires.
2020 saw the publication of Die Krone der Schöpfung, a collection of his columns. In it, Lukas Bärfuss jumps around in his topics; sometimes he is analytically cool, sometimes he argues passionately polemic, whether it is about Corona or about equal rights for women, about identity politics, about the USA, China, Brexit, and repeatedly about Switzerland. He notes that constant changes can frighten people, but he nevertheless identifies stagnation as the greater danger.
Die Krone der Schöpfung. Essays. Wallstein 2020
Malinois. Short Stories. Wallstein 2019
Krieg und Liebe. Essays. Wallstein 2018
Hagard. Novel. Wallstein 2017
Available in English:
One Hundred Days. Novel. Translated by Tess Lewis. Granta Books. 2013
The Sexual Neuroses of our Parents. Play. Translated by Neil Blackadder. Nick Hern Books 2008
Priya Basil
Priya Basil, born in London in 1977, is a British-Indian writer. She grew up in Kenya, studied in the UK, and now lives in Berlin. She has published novels and a novella, as well as numerous essays for various magazines. She is actively involved in groups promoting peace, feminism and global arms control. Recurring themes in her nonfiction works are identity, art, mass surveillance, democracy, (neo-)colonialism, and the European Union.
In her new book Im Wir und Jetzt, Priya Basil explores her own position as a woman. She grew up between two women, mother and grandmother, whose lives were both shaped by experiencing sexual violence but who dealt with it very differently. In the first part of the book, Priya Basil asks herself, and by extension the reader, about her imprints. She translates her own experiences into literature and, at the same, time gives a knowledgeable overview of feminist theories. In the second part of the book, she reports on an experiment in which she and other feminist women designed an issue of the fashion magazine Vogue. The subjective account of the experience becomes an in-depth examination of how feminism and capitalism can come together or not. In the process, Basil sets out to find (new) alliances that will sustain our society without exclusion, oppression and exploitation.
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Im Wir und Jetzt – Feministin werden. Translated from the English by Beatrice Fassbender. Suhrkamp 2021
Gastfreundschaft. Translated from the English by Beatrice Fassbender. Insel Verlag 2019
Mit Chika Unigwe: Erzählte Wirklichkeiten: Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur 2014. Swiridoff 2015
Die Logik des Herzens. Translated from the English by Barbara Christ. Schöffling 2012
Available in English:
Be my guest: reflections on food, community and the meaning of generosity. Canongate 2019
Strangers on the 16:02. Black Swan 2011
The obscure logic of the heart. Black Swan 2011
Ishq and mushq. Black Swan 2008
Shida Bazyar
Shida Bazyar was born in 1988 in Hermeskeil, where her parents had fled from Iran in 1987 because they were part of the communist resistance movement against the Khomeini-Regime.
Shida Bazyar studied literary writing in Hildesheim before moving to Berlin. She won several awards for her debut novel Nachts ist es leise in Teheran, published in 2016. She achieved an immediate literary breakthrough with this German-Iranian family story.
Drei Kameradinnen (Three Comrades) is Shida Bazyar’s second novel: the three protagonists Hani, Kasih and Saya, grew up together in a settlement where they live but don’t really belong. After years, they meet again to reconnect with old times. But their reunion is overshadowed by a dramatic event – and by the question of what Saya had to do with it.
Shida Bazyar writes about the deep friendship of three young women whose everyday experience is discrimination based on their origin: one is surprised, for example, that they speak German so well. In a society that does not seem to tolerate otherness, their friendship gives the three women support.
Denis Scheck writes: “Uncompromising and touching, Shida Bazyar tells how violence and ignorance can be countered with solidarity. She is an expert on power and the mechanisms of black-and-white thinking. Biting, polemical, self-deprecating and funny, at the same time in a serious way, she shows readers how people tend to pigeonhole others.”
Drei Kameradinnen. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2021
Nachts ist es leise in Teheran. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2016
Yari Bernasconi
Yari Bernasconi, born in Lugano in 1982, holds a PhD in Italian literature and philology from the University of Fribourg. He was leading the Italian editorial staff of the magazine Viceversa Letteratura until 2013. After publications of his poems in numerous journals and anthologies, Lettera da Dejevo was published in 2009 and the poetry collection Non è vero che saremo perdonati in 2012. He lives in Hinterkappelen near Bern and works as a cultural journalist and mediator.
Neue staubige Tage (New dusty days) visits areas full of ruins and abandonment, where the desolation does not remain merely past, but always protrudes into the present. By car, train and ferry, the poet travels through Europe, from torn Estonia to the Piedmont mountains and the French coasts to the Irish moors and back to the landscapes of Switzerland. In the process, he tells in clear and impressive language of the uprootedness, of his origins in the crisis-ridden twentieth century, and of the unease, he finds everywhere.
Yari Bernasconi depicts the walls, the rubble and the dust of those bygone days and sketches the possibilities that remain for the future. The jury statement for the Schiller Foundation’s Terra Nova Prize said of Neue staubige Tage, “A collection of poems that, with precise language and attentive to sounds, questions the relationship between past and present, history and the individual.”
In cooperation with the Casa della Letteratura per la Svizzera italiana
Neue staubige Tage / Nuovi giorni di polvere. Poems. Italian and German. Translated by Julia Dengg. Limmatverlag 2021
Martin Bieri
Martin Bieri, born in 1977, lives and works in Bern. He studied theater and art history and received his doctorate in contemporary theater and landscape theory. Today he works as a lyricist, author, dramaturge and journalist in Germany and Switzerland. He has penned various plays and scientific publications; he writes about art and football for various daily newspapers and the Swiss Dispatch Agency.
In 1749, an uprising against the Bernese government led by Samuel Henzi failed. And Lessing attempt to write a play about it failed. In Henzi Sulgenbach. Ein Lessing-Implantat (Henzi Sulgenbach. A Lessing Implant), Martin Bieri has finished Lessing’s fragment – not as a drama, but as a walk along the Sulgenbach, a mostly invisible small water stream in the city of Bern.
As a lyricist, Martin Bieri not only works on the deconstruction of space and time; he uses many allusions, references and sources. Europa, Tektonik des Kapitals (Europe, Tectonics of Capital) is the archaeological memory of the future of a continent. Bieri sits at his desk in Bern and roams Europe in his memory and on his computer.
“Martin Bieri wants to open the senses to a new perception of life, in which love is too often sacrificed to the ‘tonalities of modernity’ and people ‘disappear in their own greatness’.” (Thorsten Schulte in Literaturkritik.de)
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Unentdecktes Vorkommen. Poems. Lyrikedition 2000. Allitera Verlag 2021
Henzi Sulgenbach. Ein Lessing-Implantat. Edition Taberna Kritika 2020
Europa, Tektonik des Kapitals. Poems. Allitera Verlag 2015
Romain Buffat
Romain Buffat was born in Yverdon-les-Bains in 1989 and lives in Lausanne. He studied literature at the University of Lausanne and literary writing at the Swiss Literary Institute, where he now works as an assistant.
In his first novel, Schumacher, he tells the story of an American dream. John Schumacher, a U.S. American, is stationed at the U.S. Air Force base at Évreux in Normandy in the late 1950s, where he meets a French woman named Colette. That is all that is known about the eponym of the novel; the rest is speculation. And Romain Buffat is very good at that: he spins the story further to fill in the gaps left by Schumacher’s sudden disappearance in young Colette’s life. "Romain Buffat succeeds in creating a colorful, dazzling drawing of the world that vacillates between rock’n’roll and petty-bourgeois morality, between old Europe and the great occupying power" (Bieler Tagblatt).
The jury of the Terra Nova Prize of the Schiller Foundation justified their award of Schumacher as follows: “Romain Buffat leaves his readers with an irrepressible nostalgia, but also with a desire to love these mediocre and tiny people who traverse this short novel, characters whose forced smiles betray as much courage as cowardice, as much heroism as mediocrity; when we leave these figures of suburban Greek tragedy, ridiculous and grand, we know a little more about our humanity.”
In Leukerbad, Romain Buffat will present his novel Schumacher together with his translator Gabriela Zehnder.
In cooperation with the CTL
Schumacher. Novel. Translated by Gabriela Zehnder. Verlag die brotsuppe 2020
Monika Bütler
Monika Bütler, born in Brugg in 1961, is one of Switzerland’s most influential economists. She was a university professor of economics and director of the Swiss Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of St. Gallen and is a member of the Bank Council of the Swiss National Bank. Until the end of January 2021, she was vice president of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force.
Monika Bütler first studied physics, worked for avalanche research and Swissair, then decided to study at the HSG. Her research in the areas of aging society and demography focuses on social insurance and the labor market as well as political economy issues.
Together with two other economics professors, she writes the blog batz.ch. The aim of this platform is to build a bridge between academic research and public opinion.
The laudation for the award of an honorary doctorate from the University of Lucerne underlined: “Since the beginning of her academic career, she [Monika Bütler] has convincingly pursued the dialogue between theory and practice, thus expressing her deep conviction that a functioning society requires broad-based and constructive discussion... As an intellectual forerunner on the topics of demography and aging, she has provided a valuable impetus for policy and shaped the public debate.”
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Laura Di Corcia
Laura Di Corcia, born in 1982 in Mendrisio, graduated in modern literature with a thesis on Italian poetry of the 20th century. Since then, she has worked as a journalist. After spending time abroad in Berlin and Los Angeles, she returned to Italian-speaking Switzerland, where she works with various newspapers, mainly dealing with theater and culture. And she is a poet.
Materiality, smoothness, spaces and absences - Laura di Corcia’s new poetry collection is In tutte le direzioni (In all directions). This book is full of impulses that transform from reality into direct and immediately perceptible verses. When arrows are thrown in all directions, existences move. A movement that develops in the three parts of Laura Di Corcia’s new poetic collection, expressing itself in various themes: from the I to the You, from the We to the You. They are individual, and collective directions felt from within or observed from outside. A concrete and brilliant language underpin the poetic universe of Laura Di Corcia.
Laura Di Corcia will report in Leukerbad together with Rebecca Gisler and Michelle Steinbeck about her experiences in the project “Poethreesome”.
In tutte le direzioni. LietoColle 2018
Epica dello spreco. Dot.com Press Poesia 2015
Vita quasi vera di Giancarlo Majorino. La Vita Felice 2014
Sasha Filipenko
Sasha Filipenko, born in Minsk in 1984, is a Belarusian writer who writes in Russian. After discontinuing his classical music education, he studied literature in St. Petersburg and worked as a journalist, scriptwriter, gag writer for a satire show, and television presenter. He is a passionate football fan and lives in St. Petersburg. He currently holds a scholarship at the Fondation Jan Michalski in Montricher.
Der ehemalige Sohn (The Former Son) is the second of his five novels published in German. Young Franzisk Cello has a severe accident on his way to a rock concert and falls into a coma. Ten years later, Zisk awakens in a country that seems frozen in time, but he witnesses protesting people on the street, and it is said that they stirred for the first time after years in a coma. This literal irony of history is densely narrated, with humor and bitter seriousness.
In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, Filipenko clarifies what consequences his dissident book has for him: “My family and friends, who read in the newspapers that I am an enemy of the people, warn me not to return to Belarus. Should I go back to Petersburg? Russia has started to expel Belarusians. I tell myself that, as a football player, I am now simply a writer under contract with another European club. Maybe there will be another opportunity, in Graz or Berlin. I don’t want to ask for political asylum either.”
Der ehemalige Sohn. Novel. Translated by Ruth Altenhofer. Diogenes 2021
Rote Kreuze. Novel. Translated by Ruth Altenhofer. Diogenes 2020
Available in English:
Red Crosses. Translated by Brian James Baer, Ellen Vayne. Europa Editions 2021
Angélica Freitas
Angélica Freitas, born in 1973 in Pelotas, Brazil, is a journalist, author, poet and translator. After several years in Porto Alegre, she moved to São Paulo, where she worked as a reporter for various daily newspapers. From 2006 she lived in different countries in Europe and South America. Today she lives again in her native city.
Freitas’ poetry collections have been published in several countries, including bilingual editions in Germany. Her first book of poems rilke shake, published in Brazil in 2007, immediately attracted great attention and polarized the literary scene.
Conventions, both literary and social, are suspect to Angélica Freitas. In her poems, she overcomes the rigid rules of traditional Brazilian poetry and recalls the oral origins of poetry. The poet Ricardo Domeneck places her in a line with Christian Morgenstern, the Dadaist Hans Arp, and Gertrude Stein.
Der Uterus ist gross wie eine Faust (The Uterus is Big as a Fist) is her second book of poems and has definitively made her one of the most important poets in Brazil: she deconstructs the concept of “woman”, declining with much playfulness all the characteristics that have been assigned to women throughout the centuries, all the attitudes and positions she can assume in society. Erich Giebel commented: “To be a woman as a woman wants to be, Freitas wants to tell us, is a perpetual struggle against the absurdity of life.”
In cooperation with DAAD
Der Uterus ist gross wie eine Faust. Poems. Translated by Odile Kennel. Elif Verlag 2020
rilke shake. Poems. Translated by Odile Kennel. Luxbooks 2011
Available in English:
Rilke shake. Translated by Hilary Kaplan. Phoneme Media 2015
Rebecca Gisler
Rebecca Gisler, born in Zurich in 1991, lives in Paris. She studied at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel from 2011 to 2014 and then in Paris. She writes prose, poetry and scenic texts in German or French. Apart from being text editor of the cultural magazine Quottom she has published poems and prose in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is also a translator and translates her texts into German and French.
Rebecca Gisler regularly performs in poetic performances such as Die Satz / le Phrase or Gesicht in collaboration with two dancers. She is co-organizer of the series “Teppich” at the Literaturhaus Zürich.
Her story Flügel nähen was premiered as a radio play on SWR2, as was the theater project Die Träumer, which was created as part of her training in January 2014. The award-winning short story Radadabahn appeared in the anthology Gestern. Kindheit in der Innerschweiz. In September, her first novel D’oncle will be published in French by Éditions Verdier.
Rebecca Gisler will report in Leukerbad together with Laura Di Corcia and Michelle Steinbeck about her experiences in the project “Poethreesome”.
D’oncle. Novel. Éditions Verdier (to be published in September 2021)
Dana Grigorcea
Dana Grigorcea was born in Bucharest in 1979, where she studied German and Dutch. She then pursued studies in theater and film directing and graduated in quality journalism. After a few years in journalism, working for various European print media, radio and television stations, she began teaching aspiring media professionals. She lived in several major European cities; today, she lives with her family in Zurich and is the publisher of the Telegramme Verlag together with her husband.
Since 2003, Dana Grigorcea has been writing exclusively in German. Her new novel Die nicht sterben (Those Who Don’t Die) takes up the Dracula myth and skillfully combines it with a gloomy social picture of post-communist Romania. After studying art in Paris, a young Bucharest painter returns to the vacation spot of her childhood on the border of Transylvania. In the small town of B., she spent her summer vacations with her upper-middle-class great-aunt under chandeliers and on Persian carpets. When a desecrated body is found on the grave of Vlad the Impaler, known as Dracula, she realizes that the past has not yet let go of the place. She wants to tell the story of the cruel prince.
Ulrich Noller sums it up in the WDR: “A powerful novel that refreshes and updates the narrative of the politically oriented horror story in its own way. Not to mention its linguistic class.”
Die nicht sterben. Novel. Penguin Verlag 2021
Die Dame mit dem maghrebinischen Hündchen. Novella. Dörlemann Verlag 2018
Das primäre Gefühl der Schuldlosigkeit. Novel. Dörlemann Verlag 2015
Available in English:
An instinctive feeling of innocence. Translated by Alta Price. Seagull Books 2019
Jürg Halter
Jürg Halter, born in Bern in 1980, is a writer, musician and performance poet and is one of the pioneers of the new German-language spoken word movement. He studied at the Bern University of the Arts, made a name for himself through readings and appearances at poetry festivals, and publishes articles in various art journals and anthologies. Jürg Halter writes poetry, performs, raps and improvises – he is one of Switzerland’s most versatile authors and never stops reinventing himself in new and different ways. He performs regularly throughout Europe, in America, Africa, Russia and Japan and has published numerous books and CDs. Jürg Halter does not fit into any pigeonhole. The writer expresses himself often and with pleasure – about a society in which things are not right.
Part of his current book of poems, Gemeinsame Sprache (Common Language) was written during the Corona Spring 2020. “The poems speak of loneliness in cities, of drug intoxication in clubs, they deal with stray cats, search for the best company, explore the color blue, invent the Abc that never hurts anyone,” as the publisher says about his book. Again and again, Halter illuminates topics that move: laconic, critical, artistic, political or poetic. Passion and the will to existential immediacy unite the texts.
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Gemeinsame Sprache. Poems. Dörlemann Verlag 2021
Erwachen im 21. Jahrhundert. Novel. Zytglogge Verlag 2018
Mondkreisläufer. Play. Verlag der gesunde Menschenversand 2017
Volha Hapeyeva
Volha Hapeyeva, born in 1982 in Minsk, is a Belarusian author and has a doctor in linguistics. She writes poetry, prose and drama and translates texts to several languages. She has received numerous prizes and awards for her work.
Her poems have been translated into more than ten languages. In 2020, the poetry collection Mutantengarten (Mutant Garden) was published in German.
In her autobiographical debut novel Camel Travel (Camel Travel), we learn about the confusing situations of speaking two languages, Belarusian and Russian. In the very ordinary late-socialist everyday life, a number of obstacles come to light, which are fought out at school, in the family and in public. The text impressively outlines the path of Hapeyeva, who is known in her homeland as a feminist poet.
With her poems, Volha Hapeyeva is undoubtedly one of the leading voices of Belarusian poetry today: her poetry is full of metaphors that testify to how important language as a body and the body as language are for this poet. From a decidedly female perspective, she describes loneliness, war and violence, nature and physicality. In doing so, the poems carry hope in the power of language and inspire new courage.
Camel Travel. Novel. Translated to German by Thomas Weiler. Droschl Verlag 2021
Mutantengarten. Poems. Translated to German by Matthias Göritz, Martina Jakobson and Uljana Wolf. Edition Thanhäuser 2020
Rolf Hermann
Rolf Hermann was born in Leuk in 1973. He financed his studies in English and German literatures by working as a shepherd in Simplon. Rolf Hermann is a member of the dialect combo ‘Die Gebirgspoeten’ (The Mountain Poets). 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. Today Rolf Hermann lives with his family in Biel. He writes poetry, prose, performance texts, and radio plays, often in dialect.
In his collection of short stories, Flüchtiges Zuhause (Ephemeral Home), Rolf Hermann looks back at his childhood and adolescence in Valais. The seven stories are small literary pearls, written with great stylistic refinement. With warmth and sensitivity and in evocative as well as precise prose, he portrays the living environment of three generations over the course of time.
In part surreal and satirical, in part thoughtful and lyrical, the nearly seventy texts in Eine Kuh namens Manhattan (A Cow Named Manhattan) offer a panorama of cunning relatives in grotesque socio-political circumstances and subject to cronyism. In the afterword, Franz Hohler writes: Rolf Hermann targets the “weaknesses of rustic life.”
In a laudation, Manfred Papst said: “In his writing, Rolf Hermann goes all out. In the tradition of Robert Walser, he cultivates the gesture of disappearance. And he knows that all writing originates in solitude.”
Rolf Hermann will read together with Peter Weber at the festival opening at the Literaturhaus Zürich on 17.6. and on 24.6. they will accompany the literary walk.
Eine Kuh namens Manhattan. Spoken word texts. Edition spoken script. Der gesunde Menschenversand 2019
Flüchtiges Zuhause. Short Stories. Edition Blau. Rotpunktverlag 2018
Das Leben ist ein Steilhang. Spoken word texts. Edition spoken script. Der gesunde Menschenversand 2017
Kartographie des Schnees. Poems. Der gesunde Menschenversand 2014
Alexandre Hmine
Alexandre Hmine, born in Lugano in 1976, studied literature in Pavia and now teaches Italian at a high school in Lugano. His debut novel Milchstrasse, now available in German, was awarded the Studer/Ganz Prize and the 2019 Swiss Literature Prize.
The book depicts the story of a boy with Moroccan roots born in Ticino and placed in the care of an old widow, Elvezia. She speaks dialect, rattles her zoccoli around the house, warms the boy’s milk for Ovomaltine, teaches him the Lord’s Prayer, and sews a new carnival costume every year. Elvezia is his home.
When his mother takes him to Morocco for the first time, a different family awaits him, speaking a foreign language and subjecting him to a strange ritual. The first doubts arise in the child. At the village festival, the sausage no longer tastes good; pigs eat their own poop, his mother said. And why should he learn Arabic?
Alexandre Hmine lets a childhood and youth pass by in which a discrepancy increasingly emerges. Torn between two worlds, the adolescent threatens to lose his balance.
The NZZ writes about Milchstrasse: “The author does not spare his characters, he shows them in their many weaknesses and hardships as well as in rare happy moments. But it is from this incorruptibility that the book gains its persuasiveness and from the laconic lucidity of its tenderness.”
In cooperation with the Casa della Letteratura per la Svizzera italiana
Milchstrasse. Novel. Translated to German by Marina Galli. Rotpunkt Verlag 2021
Jonas Lüscher
Jonas Lüscher was born in Switzerland in 1976. After completing primary school teacher training in Bern and working for several years in the German film industry, he studied philosophy in Munich, Zürich, and Stanford. He left academy and, in addition to his literary publications, publishes political and philosophical essays in magazines and newspapers. With Frühling der Barbaren (Spring of the Barbarians) and Kraft, Jonas Lüscher is already one of the most acclaimed authors of contemporary literature.
In his new book Der populistische Planet. Berichte aus einer Welt in Aufruhr (The Populist Planet. Reports from a World in Turmoil), Jonas Lüscher, in joint editorship with the philosopher Michael Zichy, has brought together a group of intellectuals; the letter writers live on different continents, under different social, religious and political systems, and trace the commonalities, but also the differences between diverse manifestations of populism. From these global correspondence between Budapest, Cairo, Brasilia, Nairobi, Moscow, Salzburg and Zurich, a book about a populist-infected planet has emerged. It shows why the world is in turmoil in many places – and what it means in concrete terms to have to live under a populist government in a particular country.
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Der populistische Planet. Berichte aus einer Welt in Aufruhr. Collection of essays. Edited volume. Jonas Lüscher and Michael Zichy eds. C.H. Beck Verlag 2021
Ins Erzählen flüchten. Lectures. C.H. Beck Verlag 2020
Kraft. Novel. C.H. Beck Verlag 2017
Frühling der Barbaren. Novella. C.H. Beck Verlag 2013
Available in English:
Kraft. Novel. Translated by Tess Lewis. FSG 2020
Barbarian Spring. Novella. Translated by Peter Lewis. Haus Publishing 2015
Lukas Maisel
Lukas Maisel, born in Zurich in 1987, did an apprenticeship as a printer before studying at the Literature Institute in Biel. Since graduating in 2013, he has been writing prose, radio plays and theater texts.
Lukas Maisel’s debut is a literary adventure, light-hearted and intelligent, a captivating combination of cultural history, ethnography, and narrative imagination that not only rescues the desire to discover this world we live in into 21st-century literature but also masters the great art of humor.
The research for his first novel, Buch der geträumten Inseln (Book of Dreamed Islands), took Lukas Maisel on extensive travels through Asia. In myths and imaginations of East Asian countries, a strange creature has had a firm place for centuries: a human-animal being. However, science does not want to know about the “missing link” between man and animal. The novel’s main character, Robert Akeret, is a cryptozoologist and firmly convinced that “Europe is in decline and will soon be nothing more than the insignificant Western Cape of Asia”. He is determined to change that. At the behest of a cryptozoological society, he sets out on an expedition to the interior of Papua New Guinea. At his side: a man from the Bugis ethnic group, at the helm one who calls himself Jonah and his Swiss assistant with weak nerves. These four bizarre characters embark on a journey into the unknown, with a hand-welded cage on the bow of their ship.
Buch der geträumten Inseln. Novel. Rowohlt Verlag 2020
Jakub Małecki
Jakub Małecki, born 1982 in Koło, Poland, studied at the University of Economics in Poznan. He has published ten novels to date, for which he has won multiple awards. He also translates from English into Polish. He lives as a freelance writer in Warsaw. Rost (rust) is his first novel in German translation.
When seven-year-old Szymek’s parents die in a car accident, everything in his life changes: With his grandmother Tosia, with whom he grows up, another time begins – a life after a great rupture, as his grandmother also experienced after 1939.
The alternating chapters portray the fate of the growing Szymek on the one hand and the life of the people from Tosia’s past: the inhabitants of Cholny, on the other. The fates of these people intertwine, mirror each other in the generations and form a universe. They all remain attached to the life in the village with its dark hauntings, as if a powerful call rang up from deep in the past.
With Szymek and Tosia we dive into the present Poland and down into its war-torn history. And if these two people did not have such unconditional strength and love, expressed in silence and action, we could hardly escape the sadness of the world of Cholny. With their stubbornness, the two of them show again and again that humans can resist the rigors of reality.
With Rost, Jakub Małecki has created a panorama of life shining in the light of village peculiarity, which is able to gleam from Cholny deep into our world.
Rost. Novel. Translated from the Polish by Renate Schmidgall. Secession Verlag 2019
Patrícia Melo
Patrícia Melo, born in São Paulo in 1962, is one of the most important voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. After studying in São Paulo, she worked in television. Her socially critical work, consisting of crime novels, radio plays, plays, and screenplays, deals with the violence and crime in Brazil’s big cities. Melo has received numerous awards for her books. She lives in Lugano in southern Switzerland.
Gestapelte Frauen (Piled Women), her latest novel, tells of the suffering of indigenous women. The narrator – herself affected by violence – is a lawyer who takes a job as an observer at trials of women killers. In a thematically shocking and linguistically impressive novel, Patricía Melo describes how women of all backgrounds rebel against a web of violence. The protagonist comes closer and closer to the lives of the victims – the daughters, the mothers, the girlfriends. She is haunted more and more insistently by images from her childhood, by pictures of her mother. To escape reality, she takes refuge in a world of intoxication and dreams – in mysterious forests, alongside aboriginal women who pursue the perpetrators. In fact, however, justice seems unattainable.
“The Stories Behind the Headlines. One woman’s outcry for all others. A stirring, accusatory, and for that very reason, an urgent novel.” as the Jornal do Brasil noted.
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Gestapelte Frauen. Novel. Unionsverlag 2021
Der Nachbar. Novel. Tropen Verlag 2018
Trügerisches Licht. Novel. Tropen Verlag 2016
All: Translated from the Portuguese by Barbara Mesquita.
Available in English (only the most recent):
The body snatcher. Novel. Translated by Clifford Landers. Bitter Lemon 2015
Inferno. Novel. Translated by Clifford Landers, 2003
In praise of lies. Novel. Translated by Clifford Landers. Bloomsbury 2000.
Eva Menasse
Eva Menasse was born in Vienna in 1970. She studied German and history, worked as a journalist for the Viennese news magazine Profil and as culture editor for the FAZ. In 2000, she spent several weeks reporting on the London trial of Holocaust denier David Irving. Menasse’s first book dealt with this case and appeared in 2000 under the title Der Holocaust vor Gericht.
In 2017, Tiere für Fortgeschrittene (Animals for the Advanced) published eight stories about everyday problems, each of which takes a curious animal news story as its point of departure. Each of these eight texts is preceded by a small science message that deals with animals. They tell of caterpillars that dig their graves, sharks that are artificially ventilated, ducks that look out for predators while still asleep, sheep that shed their wool by themselves. At the same time, the stories are devoted entirely to the human species: a man tries to conceal his wife’s dementia, a mother tries in vain to behave in a politically correct manner toward her daughter’s Muslim classmate, and a patchwork family goes on an all-inclusive vacation to Turkey.
Eva Menasse links the individual stories through an underlying sense of sadness. For years, the author has collected her animal tales, which – like inverted fables – seem to reveal something about the human behavior of the characters in her stories.
In Leukerbad, she will also read from her new novel Dunkelblum, which will be published in August.
Dunkelblum. Novel. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2021 (to be published on 19 August 2021)
Gedankenspiele über den Kompromiss. Literaturverlag Droschl 2020
Tiere für Fortgeschrittene. Stories. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2017
Lieber aufgeregt als abgeklärt. Essays. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2015
Available in English:
Vienna. Novel. Phoenix 2007
Sharon Dodua Otoo
Sharon Dodua Otoo, born in London in 1972, is a British-German writer with Ghanaian roots. She is an author, publicist and political activist: Otoo writes prose and essays and is the editor of the English-language book series Witnessed. She studied German and Management Studies in London and now lives in Berlin.
Otoo writes about magical realism, Afrofuturism, relationships, and empowerment. In her novellas die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle and Synchronicity, Sharon Dodua Otoo tells of colors and shades of gray, of insecurities and self-assertion with fantastic lightness, heartfelt humor, and relentless acumen. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin.
This year saw the publication of her first novel Adas Raum. It tells the life stories of four different women from different centuries. The heavy fates of these four women, two black and two white, who experience violence, degradation and humiliation, show the crushing historical weight that weighs on women and affects today’s conditions.
Adas Raum is balancing linguistically between very different tones, the laconicism of pain and sometimes subtle mockery. It draws a connecting line from Europe’s colonial past through the Nazi era to the present day.
Adas Raum. Novel. S. Fischer Verlag 2021
die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle... und Synchronicity. Two novels. S. Fischer Verlag Taschenbuch 2017
Available in English:
Synchronicity: the original story. edition assemblage 2015
the things i am thinking while smiling politely. edition assemblage 2012
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, born in Kenya in 1968, studied in Nairobi, Reading (England) and Queensland (Australia). She writes short stories, essays, and novels. Owuor has worked as a computer scientist and event manager, and to this day, she develops artistic programs for development initiatives and conversation series between Africa and Asia. She lives in Nairobi and is one of the most important literary voices on the African continent.
Owuor crafted her highly acclaimed debut novel, Der Ort, an dem die Reise endet (The Place where the journey ends), in her signature fragmentary, poetic, and fast-paced style.
Owuor’s second novel, Das Meer der Libellen (The Dragonfly Sea), is a coming-of-age story. Ayaana lives with her mother on Pate Island, off the coast of Kenya. When a sailor enters her life, she finds something she has always longed for: a father. But as Ayaana grows up, she witnesses profound events: Strangers with dubious pasts show up, religious extremists seek refuge on the island, China reaches out to Africa, and nature takes its toll with a tsunami. So Ayaana decides to seek her fortune far away and starts studying in China. She embarks on a dangerous voyage by ship, which in the end is one thing above all – a journey to herself.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor presents a powerful novel about a young woman struggling to find her place in the world – a moving story about fate, death, love and loss.
In cooperation with DAAD
Das Meer der Libellen. Novel. Translated by Simone Jakob. DuMont 2020
Der Ort, an dem die Reise endet. Novel. Translated by von Simone Jakob. DuMont 2017
Available in English:
The Dragonfly Sea. Novel. Vintage 2020
Dust. Novel. Granta 2015
Anna Prizkau
Anna Prizkau, born in Moscow in 1986, has lived in Germany since 1994. She studied in Hamburg and Berlin and has worked as a waitress, bartender, newspaper delivery girl, hostess, proband and art dealer before becoming a journalist. Since 2012, she has been writing about foreigners, Germany and other countries, and literature for the feature section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin. Initially, she was a freelance writer. Since 2016 she has been part of the editorial team.
In her first book Fast ein neues Leben (Almost a New Life), Anna Prizkau tackles the topic of migration in twelve stirring stories. A family comes to Germany from their old country. There, unimaginable and incomprehensible things happen – at least for the immigrants’ daughter. The first-person narrator grows up in the new country, but the stories about the old one won’t let her go.
In Fast ein neues Leben (Almost a New Life), Anna Prizkau tells of the new country that is Germany, of the foreigners and the lost, including those who were born here, and "of a life that tries with all its might to deny its inner conflict – in front of others and in front of oneself. And how this does not succeed again and again. They also tell of how the protagonist is put in the corner of the East against her will, even by ultra-tolerant lecturers at the university during the get-to-know-you game when it comes to her origins. That’s where you belong.
“Anna Prizkau shows the hairline cracks in the stable house of tolerance and belonging. What effort it takes to be like everyone. Or how one believes that everyone is. [...] Prizkau writes fiction in a beautiful, concise, clear language. [...] A courageous, combative, beautiful book,” Volker Weidermann notes for SPIEGEL Online.
Fast ein neues Leben. Stories. Friedenauer Presse 2020
Monika Rinck
Monika Rinck was born in Zweibrücken in 1969. She studied religious studies, history and comparative literature in Bochum, Berlin and Yale. She is a poet, essayist and translator. Monika Rinck moves in different fields of art and literature. Already during her studies, she developed a penchant for interdisciplinary and intermedial crossings.
The wonderful reading book Champagner für die Pferde (Champagne for the Horses) brings together poems, essays and short prose by the author from over 20 years. It is about wit and literature, love and friendship, swimming and sleeping, happiness and exhaustion. It’s about collecting and discarding, poetics and psychoanalysis, prefixes and suffixes, and the ecstasy of repetition. An opulent, wild book, a foray through Monika Rinck’s entire oeuvre and a celebration of poetry. Yet, the book is rigorously composed; the texts are profound and direct with a critical gaze on social contexts. Rinck has a healthy distrust of meaningfulness and a fresh tone, a sound that catches the ear, gives pleasure and is remarkable.
What poetic freedom means, Monika Rinck illustrates with level and great skill. Thus she writes in Champagner für die Pferde: “What knocks me down, knocks me back on myself. But I have already been there. I’m interested in a poetic quality that is reliable by helping me to leave myself.”
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Champagner für die Pferde. A reader. S. Fischer Verlag 2019
Alle Türen. Poems. Kookbooks 2019
Wirksame Fiktionen. Lichtenberg-Poetry Reading. Wallstein 2019
Heida! Heida! He! Sadismus von irgend etwas Modernem und ich und Lärm! Fernando Pessoas sensationistischer Ingenieur Álvaro de Campos. Verlag Das Wunderhorn 2019
Available in English:
Sixteen poems. Poems. Translated by Alistair Noon. Barque Press 2009
D.A.F. de Sade
Born in Paris in 1740, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade wrote pornographic as well as philosophical novels that are indisputably works of world literature. At the time of the French Revolution, he was imprisoned in the Bastille, where he wrote his best-known work, The 120 Days of Sodom. On the grounds of his sexual aberrations, he was declared insane and institutionalized in the Charenton-le-Pont asylum until his death in 1814.
Following an assignation with four prostitutes that went off the rails in Marseilles in 1771, a royal warrant for his arrest was issued but he had long since fled—with Anne-Prospère, his wife Renée’s beautiful younger sister. In Italy, he and his lover indulged in their amour fou and, also indulging in his love of the encyclopedic, he noted down an inventory of Italian culture. Intermixed with descriptions of architecture and cuisine are scandalous observations: carnival scenes in Naples resemble satanic orgies, prostitution and violence dictate life in society while Christian superstition holds men in an iron grip. The journey ends with de Sade’s incarceration. In prison, he first tries to refashion his radical report into a travel guide for upper-class society but rejects this idea for a monumental novel that would question all Christian values, Justine and Juliette. Through selected episodes from de Sade’s work, Stefan Zweifel convincingly shows how the Italian journey offers a background to de Sade’s oeuvre and, with Michale Pfister, translates excerpts from the travel notes into German for the first time.
Stefan Zweifel and Thomas Sarbacher will bring The Italian Journey to Leukerbad.
Erotische Italienreise. From the French by Stefan Zweifel and Michael Pfister. Matthes & Seitz 2020
Available in English:
Italian Journey. Translated by James A. Steintrager. Toronto University Press 2020
The 120 Days of Sodom. Novel. Translated by Richard Seaver. Grove Press 1967
Joachim Sartorius
As the son of a diplomat, Joachim Sartorius was born in Fürth in 1946 and was educated in Tunisia, the Congo, and Cameroon. He studied law and worked as a diplomat in New York, Ankara, and Nicosia (Cyprus). In the following years, he directed the artist program of the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Program, served as General Secretary of the Goethe Institute in Munich, and, from 2001 to 2011, as Director-General of the Berliner Festspiele.
Last year Joachim Sartorius published a wonderful portrait of lizards in the publisher Matthes & Seitz’s Naturkunden (Nature) series. Even as a child in Tunisia, he had been enchanted by the most alert animal in the world; for him, lizards were a code for the south. Under the spell of their steady, unwavering gaze, their flickering tongues, their razor-sharp egg teeth and their shimmering colors, he felt the breath of an original world of dragons and dinosaurs.
Wohin mit den Augen is the title of Joachim Sartorius’ new volume of poetry. The poet, according to Sartorius, is first and foremost a man of the eyes, one who observes and sensitively perceives the deep layers of reality.
His alert gaze not only registers the present moment but as a curious and educated person, he also picks up on the history and myths of the places he writes about. “Since everything past is here and now,” it says programmatically in one of the Sicilian poems.
Wohin mit den Augen. Poems. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2021
Eidechsen. A portrait. Matthes & Seitz 2019
Für nichts und wieder alles. Poems. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2016
Niemals eine Atempause. Handbuch der politischen Poesie im 20. Jahrhundert. Poetry anthology. Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2014
Franziska Schutzbach
Franziska Schutzbach was born in 1978 and is a gender researcher and sociologist. She teaches and pursues her research at various universities in Switzerland and Germany. Her research focuses on the rhetoric of anti-feminism, anti-gender, and anti-equality in right-wing populism. She is also a blogger and commentator.
In her study Die Rhetorik der Rechten (The Rhetoric of the Right), Franziska Schutzbach shows how right-wing populism employs rhetoric. A specifically right-wing populist rhetoric is making right-wing and far right-wing world views socially acceptable again. One strategy of this rhetoric is to blur the boundary between conservative and right-wing nationalist positions and make extreme stances unrecognizable. This renders them more compatible with the center. Some at the center have become radicalized without appearing to have joined the ‘right’. The handbook offers an exact but accessible view of right-wing populist strategies of discourse and thus also offers a tool that can be used against this discourse.
Franziska Schutzbach is one of the editors of the trilingual book “I will be different every time”. Schwarze Frauen in Biel. This book tells a piece of black women’s history in Switzerland. It makes women visible with their biographies, ways of thinking, perspectives and lifeworlds, which are rarely taken note of in Switzerland.
Conversation series “Perspectives”
“I will be different every time” Schwarze Frauen in Biel. Femmes Noires à Bienne. Black Women in Biel. Editors: Fork Burke, Myriam Diarra and Franziska Schutzbach. Verlag die brotsuppe 2020
Politiken der Generativität. Reproduktive Gesundheit, Bevölkerung und Geschlecht. Das Beispiel der Weltgesundheitsorganisation. Transcript Verlag 2020
Die Rhetorik der Rechten. Rechtspopulistische Diskursstrategien im Überblick. Xanthippe 2018
Christoph Simon
Christoph Simon was born in Langnau in 1972. After extensive travel throughout the world, he now lives and works in Bern. He is versatile: he writes novels and short texts, records audiobooks, draws cartoons, performs as a cabaret artist or poetry slammer, and publishes videos. Simon is currently active with a solo stage performance program.
His novels often portray the difficult lives of young, often naïve protagonists. In his fourth novel, Fussgänger Zbinden, Simon created a new tone: in this gentle, nuanced book he lets an old man have his say and venture to feel life’s great emotions. His latest, small but fine books tread other paths:
The short stories in Die Dinge daheim deal with the objects of a household. The objects get into completely screwed-up situations or they have exaggerated ideas and dreams.
und das nach vier milliarden jahren evolution, another new book by Christoph Simon, is a collection of poems from recent years. Typical of Simon, the poems here are also small stories, playful, with wit and enigmatic humor. Helmut Schönauer judges: “Simon’s poems are designed as lyrical stories. They all have a content that can even be retold. But the lyrically unsayable lurks between the lines and in those line breaks that always appear when one believes to have understood something in a linear way.”
And: No other author has been a guest at the Leukerbad Literature Festival more often than Christoph Simon!
Und das nach vier milliarden jahren evolution. Poems. Edition merkwürdig 2021
Die Dinge daheim. Edition taberna kritika 2021
Spaziergänger Zbinden. Novel. Bilgerverlag 2010
Available in English:
Zbinden’s Progress. Translated by Donal McLaughlin. And Other Stories 2014
Marina Skalova
Marina Skalova was born in Moscow in 1988, grew up in France and Germany, and now lives in Geneva. She studied literature and philosophy in Paris and Berlin and at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel.
Marina Skalova writes poetry, prose and theater texts and also works as a translator, dramaturge, theater critic and editor. In German, her texts have been published in various journals and anthologies in France, Germany and Switzerland, as well as on the radio.
Marina Skalova often writes bilingually, German and French, or she translates her poems herself. Thus, she uses one language to complement the other, to eradicate inaccuracies, to open an additional resonance space.
Her poetry collection Atemnot (Souffle court) was awarded the prestigious "Prix de la vocation" in France in 2016. The poems in it are short and of great poetic conciseness. In Exploration du flux, she follows the flows of globalization, refugees, flows of money, flood of information. In the piece Der Sturz der Kometen und Kosmonauten (The fall of comets and cosmonauts), she addresses the fall of the USSR and political ideologies. For Silences d’exiles, Marina Skalova, together with a photographer, explored these experiences in workshops for women and men living in exile in Switzerland – photographically and poetically. Marina Skalova’s texts are not always easy to read, but they are always necessary and deeply human.
In Leukerbad, Marina Skalova will read bilingually from her works.
Silences d’exils. Together with the photographer Nadège Abadie. Éditions d’en bas 2020
La chute des comètes et des cosmonautes. L’Arche éditeur 2019. German, also 2019: Der Sturz der Kometen und Kosmonauten, published in the journal Theater der Zeit and in the anthology Scène 21
Exploration du flux. Seuil 2018
Amarres. Récit. L’Âge d’Homme 2017
Atemnot (Souffle court). Poems. French und German. Cheyne 2016
Michelle Steinbeck
Michelle Steinbeck, born in Lenzburg in 1990, grew up in Zurich, studied literary writing in Biel and lives in Basel.
She writes stories, poems and plays, columns and reportages. Her literary, as well as journalistic texts, are translated into various languages. Steinbeck is a senior editor of the Fabrikzeitung, a columnist for WOZ, and a student of philosophy and sociology. Her debut novel Mein Vater war ein Mann an Land und im Wasser ein Walfisch (My father was a man on land and a whale in the water) was published by Lenos Verlag in 2016 and was nominated for the German and Swiss Book Prize. This was followed in 2018 by the poetry collection Eingesperrte Vögel singen mehr.
Her poems are untamed, stubborn and artfully arranged. They squeeze and itch, sometimes scream shrilly and sometimes whisper softly. They tell fairy tales, beautiful and gruesome, and they lead an always attentive looking I and plenty of grotesque personnel onto the stage of literature.
Mein Vater war ein Mann an Land und im Wasser ein Walfisch is a virtuoso story of development. It tells the adventures of a young woman whose fears of growing up have come to life in an unleashed language. The fairy-tale imagery surprises with whimsical twists and turns, revealing an alert eye on the timeless themes of adolescence.
Michelle Steinbeck will report in Leukerbad together with Laura Di Corcia and Rebecca Gisler about her experiences in the project “Poethreesome”.
Eingesperrte Vögel singen mehr – gedichtet und geträumt. Voland & Quist 2018
Mein Vater war ein Mann an Land und im Wasser ein Walfisch. Novel. Lenos 2016
Available in English:
My father was a man on land and a whale in the water. Translated by Jen Calleja. Darf 2018
Klaus Theweleit
Klaus Theweleit, born in East Prussia in 1942, studied German and English language and literature. Today he lives as a freelance writer and lecturer in Germany, the USA, Switzerland and Austria. Between 1998 and 2008, Theweleit was professor of art and theory at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.
He became known for his monumental work Männerphantasien (1977/78), a new edition of which will be published by Matthes & Seitz in 2019. With it, Klaus Theweleit presents his investigation into the sexual, psychological, and sociopolitical prehistory of National Socialism in the Weimar Republic. The work, which many consider being the prelude to men’s studies in Germany, has long since become a classic in the study of violence as well. In view of the return of right-wing street terror and fascist positions that make many think of Weimar conditions, as well as propaganda campaigns against freer sexualities – keyword: “gender mania” – the book’s analyses are far too burning to put it on the shelf of great works in the archive. In the new edition, supplemented by an afterword by the author, Theweleit’s epochal work is now finally available again and can be discussed and used in a new political way.
Klaus Theweleit’s four-volume Pocahontas series, which addresses current gender issues while touching on traditional female roles, has also been reissued.
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Pocahontas 1–4. New edition. Matthes & Seitz 2020
Männerphantasien. New edition. Matthes & Seitz 2019
With Rainer Höltschl: Jimi Hendrix. A biography. Rowohlt 2008
Das Lachen der Täter: Breivik u.a. Psychogramm der Tötungslust. Residenz Verlag 2015
Michael Thumann
Michael Thumann, born in 1962, is a foreign affairs correspondent for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. He writes about international politics, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. As a political editor, he has travelled extensively through Southeastern Europe since 1996, especially in the disintegrating Yugoslavia. He was a correspondent in Moscow and reported on Russia and Muslims in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Until the end of 2007, he coordinated Zeit’s foreign policy coverage, later becoming correspondent for the Middle East based in Istanbul and heading Zeit’s Moscow bureau in 2014/2015.
In his new book, Der neue Nationalismus. Wiederkehr einer totgeglaubten Ideologie (The new Nationalism. Return of an Ideology believed dead), Thumann examines historically, in an overview of Europe and analysing developments in the U.S. under Trump, the old-new patterns of nationalism; an idea born during and after the wars of the French Revolution that spread from Western to Eastern Europe and eventually across the world.
Nationalists are gaining ground in Russia, Turkey, and the rest of Europe. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian rulers are using nationalism as a means to expand their power. Putin, Erdogan, and Orbán threaten liberal democracies as well as classical alliances.
Michael Thumann has been researching nationalism for years – there has never been a comparably broad and materially rich study like this. His analyses should be read as a warning and an appeal: There is no such thing as good nationalism.
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Der neue Nationalismus. Wiederkehr einer totgeglaubten Ideologie. Die Andere Bibliothek 2020
Der Islam-Irrtum. Europas Angst vor der muslimischen Welt. Die Andere Bibliothek 2011
Joseph Vogl
Joseph Vogl, born in Lower Bavaria in 1957, is a professor of modern German literature and cultural studies in connection with media at Humboldt University in Berlin and a visiting professor at Princeton University. He is a translator of key works in recent French philosophy, including authors such as Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard.
In his new book, Kapital und Ressentiment (Capital and Resentment), he describes how a trail of destruction runs from the domination of financial markets to the new network giants to the opinion industry. Democracy, freedom and social responsibility are falling by the wayside. In his brilliant analysis, Joseph Vogl reconstructs how new forms of corporate power have emerged in the digital age, overwriting our familiar political universe with their own evaluation logic and intervening ever more massively in the decision-making processes of governments, societies and economies across national borders.
In the process, private companies always act faster and more efficiently than state authorities because they do not have to take into account lengthy democratic processes. And they seize their opportunity. Joseph Vogl already recognizes a “state formation of information machines,” which can be seen, for example, in the development of separate currencies that are no longer conceived as public commons but as privately owned monetary systems. All signs seem to indicate that, according to Vogl, “... an efficient detachment of the net citizen from the state citizen is taking place, resulting in a more or less voluntary accession of entire populations to a private ‘online state.’”
Conversation series “Perspectives”
Kapital und Ressentiment. C.H. Beck Verlag 2021
Der Souveränitätseffekt. Diaphanes Verlag 2015
Das Gespenst des Kapitals. Diaphanes Verlag 2010
As co-editor: Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus. Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2018
Peter Weber
The writer Peter Weber was born in Wattwil in 1968 and grew up there. Today he lives in Toggenburg, in Zurich and occasionally in Istanbul. He searches, as hardly any other author of his generation, for the music in language, for the sound of words and sentences.
His first book, Der Wettermacher (The Weather Maker), was celebrated as an original work in 1993 and earned the author several prestigious literary prizes. Since then, Peter Weber has been regarded as a strikingly independent voice in Swiss literature. His novels stand out from the monotony of contemporary literature because of their musical and original language, as the FAZ notes.
Characteristic of Peter Weber’s work is his exuberant imagination and his pronounced sense of rhythm. With rhythm, he thematizes language and with language rhythm. He likes to bypass larger crowds unless he is a player in the midst of many or, as in train stations and tracks, a listener. No wonder the jaw’s harp is his instrument. No wonder that the orange, fully mechanical typewriter of Hermes is his instrument.
Peter Weber’s last publication was several years ago, but it still proves why it is worth waiting patiently for a new book from the author. In Leukerbad, he will read new texts.
Peter Weber will read together with Rolf Hermann at the festival opening at the Literaturhaus Zürich on 17.6. and on 24.6. they will accompany the literary walk.
Die melodielosen Jahre. Novel. Suhrkamp 2007
Bahnhofsprosa. Miniatures. Suhrkamp 2002
Der Wettermacher. Suhrkamp 1993. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1996
Gabriela Zehnder
Born in 1955 in Toggenburg (SG), Gabriela Zehnder came to literary translation in a detour. After studying curative education and pedagogy and working for several years as a social pedagogue in Fribourg, Geneva and Lugano, she decided to make her passion, literature, her profession. During a three-year sailing trip on the Mediterranean, she completed a correspondence course in Germany to become a state-certified translator in French, graduating in 1997 with a diploma from the Ministry of Culture of Baden-Württemberg. Since then, she has worked as a freelance literary translator from French and Italian. She has translated works by authors such as Emmanuel Bove, Corinna S. Bille, René Laporte, Muriel Barbery, Adrien Pasquali, Marie Modiano, David Bosc, Gustave Roud, Giuliana Pelli Grandini, Carlo Zanda, among others. She has also translated various plays, such as those by Marielle Pinsard, Claudine Berthet and Mario Perrotta. Gabriela Zehnder has lived in Ticino since 1986.
She says of her work: “When I’m working on a translation, my thoughts are always on the text, even when I’m not sitting at the computer - weeding in the garden, playing the cello, in the car ... It’s not unusual for the most beautiful solutions to fall right into my lap.”
In Leukerbad, Gabriela Zehnder will present together with Romain Buffat his novel Schumacher, which she has translated from the French.
In cooperation with the CTL