Festival NEUE LITERATUR | CONVERSATION | Up, Up and Away
In Up, Up and Away Joseph O’Neill, María Cecilia Barbetta, and Perikles Monioudis, three authors of different origins and with different paths, discuss their takes on the colorful and dark sides of cultural transfer, whether forced, accepted, or deliberate, with Klaus Nüchtern.
Up, Up and Away is the third conversation of the festival, led by Klaus Nüchtern.
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Jimmy Webb: “Up, Up and Away”
Large or small? Near or far? Urban or provincial? Sometimes it’s hard to say, and it’s definitely a question of perspective.
Perikles Monioudis, for instance, was born in Glarus, Switzerland as the son of Greek parents from cosmopolitan Alexandria. A town of less than 6,000 inhabitants, it had been rebuilt in grid pattern based on the American model after a fire.
María Cecilia Barbetta came from Buenos Aires to Berlin, ended up staying and writes in German.
And Joseph O’Neill, of Irish-Turkish extraction, grew up in the Netherlands where he attended the Lycée Française and the British School. It goes without saying that a person with this kind of background couldn’t live anywhere else but the famous Chelsea Hotel – with his family.
As different as the origins, paths, and aesthetic sense of these three writers may be, one thing they have in common is their spirited take on the colorful (and dark) sides of cultural transfer, whether forced, accepted, or deliberate. Having set out in this manner, where, then, do these people arrive?
María Cecilia Barbetta summed it up aptly in an interview: “I’m at home where Argentina and Germany meet. But you won’t find that place on any ordinary map.”
Download the authors’ biographies here.
The annual Festival NEUE LITERATUR brings some of the best up and coming German-speaking authors to New York, where they encounter well-known American writers in a series of conversations and readings.
This year’s edition of the festival centers on the notion of mobility in today’s increasingly globalized world. Many authors in Europe and the United States share an immigrant back-ground and write in languages that are different from what they grew up with.
The “immigrant experience” has become a common theme in many recent books of contemporary fiction. However, mobility or the lack thereof is not only experienced by authors who have arrived and struggled to establish themselves and their identities in a new and often hostile society, but also by writers who are longing to move away from their small-town provincial surroundings but feel that they are stuck and cannot leave.
Contemporary fiction lets people move from one place to another or never at all, but it shows that ultimately, mobility is a concept of our mind.
The Festival NEUE LITERATUR is organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, the German Consulate General in New York, the German Book Office, the Goethe-Institut New York, and Deutsches Haus at NYU.
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