FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR 2014 | LITERARY BRUNCH
Festival Neue Literatur 2014, New York’s only annual German-language literary festival held in English, will take place from February 28 to March 2, 2014, at venues throughout NYC. This will be the fifth installment of Festival Neue Literatur (FNL), where New York City once again plays host to six authors from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. These authors are literary stars in the German-language world—but their oeuvre still remains to be discovered by U.S. readers.
The 2014 FNL-authors are: Milena Michiko Flašar and Maja Haderlap (Austria), Olga Grjasnowa and Abbas Khider (Germany), Melinda Nadj Abonji and Richard Weihe (Switzerland), with special U.S. guest authors Monique Truong and Keith Gessen. The festival’s tongue-in-cheek motto, “Discover famous* authors nobody** has heard of (*Austrian, German, and Swiss **in the U.S.),” speaks to this dichotomy and extends an invitation to New York audiences to participate in the three-day festival, which will include readings and discussions in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
At this event at Deutsches Haus at NYU, all six German-language authors of Festival Neue Literatur give a sampling from their work, providing a taste of new writing from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Traditional German fare will be served.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Born in 1968 in Becsej, Vojvodina, Melinda Nadj Abonji (Switzerland) earned a master’s degree in German and history in Zurich, where she now lives as an author and musician (violin and vocals). She has collaborated since 1998 with poet and beatboxer Jurczok 1001 (text performance, music, theatre). She lectured from 2003 to 2009 at Zurich Teachers’ College, where she led a writing workshop, and has led her own writing workshop since 2007. Nadj Abonji’s first novel, Im Schaufenster im Frühling (In the Showcase in Spring), was published in 2004 and has been the recipient of numerous awards. Tauben fliegen auf (Fly Away, Pigeon), her second novel, won 2010 the German Book Prize and the Swiss Book Prize.
Milena Michiko Flašar (Austria) was born in 1980 in St. Pölten, Austria. She studied comparative literature, German studies, and Romance studies in Berlin. Her mother is Japanese and her father is Austrian, and she lives in Vienna as a writer and German teacher. She has published three novels: Ich bin (I Am, 2008), Okaasan – Meine unbekannte Mutter (Okaasan—My Unknown Mother, 2010), and most recently, Ich nannte ihn Krawatte I Called Him Necktie, 2012), which was nominated for the German Book Prize last year. She has been awarded several grants and awards, including the Alpha Literaturpreis in 2012.
Olga Grjasnowa (Germany) was born in 1984 in Baku, Azerbaijan, grew up in the Caucasus, and spent extended periods in Poland, Russia, and Israel. She moved to Germany at the age of twelve and is a graduate of the German Institute for Literature/Creative Writing in Leipzig. All Russians Love Birch Trees, for which she received a research grant from the Robert Bosch Foundation, has won the Kühne Prize, the Anna Seghers Prize, and was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2012.
Maja Haderlap (Austria) studied Theatre and German Literature at the University of Vienna. From 1992 to 2007 she was Head of Dramaturgy at the Municipal Theatre of Klagenfurt and holds annual classes at the Institute for Applied Cultural Sciences at the Alpen Adria University in Klagenfurt. Since 2008 she has lived and worked as a freelance author in Klagenfurt. She has published several volumes of poetry and essays in Slovenian and German, and translations from Slovenian. She won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for an excerpt from her first novel, The Angel of Oblivion. She has received many other awards including the Bruno Kreisky Prize, the Rauriser Literature Prize, and the Vincenz Rizzi Prize.
Abbas Khider (Germany) grew up in Baghdad, where, at 19, he was arrested for “political reasons”. Having served two years in prison he fled Iraq in 1999, fearing he would be re-arrested. For four years he travelled
through Arab and European countries as an illegal refugee, working as a carpet delivery man, teacher, garbage sorter, and cleaner, all the while writing poetry almost daily. He has lived in Germany since 2000, where he studied literature and philosophy in Munich and Potsdam. Having published workds of poetry in Arabic, he wrote his first novel in German, Der falsche Inder in 2008 (The Village Indian, Seagull Books, 2013), for which he received the Alfred Döblin Stipend of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The novels Die Orangen des Präsidenten (The President’s Oranges, 2011), and Brief in die Auberginenrepublik (Letter to the Aubergine Republic, 2013)followed. His other awards include the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Förderpreis, the HildeDomin Prize and the Nelly Sachs Prize. Khider became a German citizen in 2007.
Richard Weihe (Switzerland) is a freelance writer and professor of theater studies at the Scuola Teatro Dmitri in Ticino as well as a guest lecturer at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Born and raised in Switzerland, he studied at the Universities of Zurich, Bonn, and Oxford, where he completed his doctorate in Comparative Literature. He balances his scholarly research with creative pursuits and along with studies of the theater and a cultural history of the mask, he has published three novels, a libretto, and a radio play as well as translations of Mark Strand’s poetry, of a play by the Elizabethan playwright Francis Beaumont, and of libretti Jacques Offenbach, Kurt Weill, and Gioacchino Rossini. He has received several grants and awards, including the Prize of the Literary commission Zurich, 2003, the Prix des Auditeurs de la Radio Suisse Romande in 2005, and the Kulturförderungsgabe/literature division of the Swiss Bank Cooperation UBS in 2007.
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
The theme of the 2014 festival, which was curated by eminent translator and writer Tess Lewis, is Border Crossings. While the Festival features writers who identify as Austrian, German, or Swiss, their backgrounds could not be more diverse. “They are exiles, refugees, immigrants or children of immigrants, who live and write between several languages and cultures. With heartbreak and flashes of dark humor, their novels recount the stories of men and women buffeted by shifting world orders, stranded on foreign territory at home and abroad,” says Lewis.
Every winter, the festival pairs the six visiting authors with two U.S. authors, who bring an American perspective and sensibility to these events, creating a dynamic of literary exchange and discourse. The 2014 festival will proudly feature two celebrated American writers, the Vietnamese-American novelist Monique Truong and Russian-born novelist, journalist, and co-founder of the literary magazine n + 1, Keith Gessen. Former U.S. guests have included Chris Adrian, Joseph O’Neill, Francine Prose, and Joshua Ferris, among others.
Festival Neue Literatur was established as a collaborative project of New York’s leading German-language cultural institutions: the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Consulate General of Switzerland, the Consulate General of Germany, Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, Deutsches Haus at NYU, the German Book Office, Goethe-Institut New York, and Pro Helvetia. All FNL events are free of charge, though RSVPs are required. The 2014 Festival will take place from February 28 to March 2, 2014.
>> More information: festivalneueliteratur.org