ACFNY SUPPORTED: Friedrich Ulfers Prize & Festival Neue Literatur 2024 “Whose/Story Is History: Shifting the Perspective.”
Image: Deutsches Haus at NYU
NOVEMBER 13 | 6 – 8 PM
Deutsches Haus At New York University, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003
PLEASE RSVP HERE
The Festival Neue Literatur partners present the 2024 Friedrich Ulfers Prize and the Festival Neue Literatur satellite event, “Whose/Story Is History: Shifting the Perspective.”
This year’s Friedrich Ulfers Prize will be awarded to the Edwin Frank, founder and editorial director of the New York Review of Books Classics series. The laudation will be delivered by Geoffrey O’Brien. Professor Friedrich Ulfers (NYU) will provide short remarks.
The Festival Neue Literatur event, “Whose/Story Is History: Shifting the Perspective” will feature readings by and a conversation among authors, Katja Brunner, Maaza Mengiste, Sharon Dodua Otoo, and Doron Rabinovici. The conversation will be moderated by Tess Lewis.
About “Whose/Story Is History: Shifting the Perspective.”
What do we hear when unheeded voices are given their say? How are public narratives subverted by the powerful or even the powerless? Can stories of individuals long dead help break cycles of injustice?
In this conversation, a Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) event, acclaimed German- and English-language authors Maaza Mengiste, Doron Rabinovici, Katja Brunner, and Sharon Dodua Otoo will read from their recent work and discuss how they use literature to disrupt conventional notions of history and historical timelines. Their works animate the stories of the Ethiopian women who fought against the Italian invasion of their country in 1935, a photographer who loses control of his images, women who have been branded as witches or hysterics and silenced through violence and abuse, and the interrelation of women’s lives across generations and continents. Their conversation will be moderated by award-winning literary translator and writer Tess Lewis.
Participating speakers:
Katja Brunner is a writer and performer who was born in Zurich, Switzerland. She studied Creative Writing for the Stage at the University of the Arts in Berlin and Literary Writing at the Institut for Literature in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. She is a writer of plays and prose. Her works include Geister sind auch nur Menschen (Fischer, 2015), Die Hand ist ein einsamer Jäger (Fischer, 2019), and Die Kunst der Wunde (Fischer, 2022). Among other accolades, she has been awarded the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis for her debut play “stumpy legs too short” (“von den beinen zu kurz”). Currently she is working on a new version of “The Taming of the Shrew” for Deutsches Theater Berlin. An important part of her body of work is collective writing with e.g. Martina Clavadetscher or performing her texts alongside musicians such as Magda Drozd. Her work explores the boundaries of the human body, power distribution and abuse of power, and has been translated into many languages and staged between Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Zurich. She lives and works between the Alps and Berlin.
Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. Her story, “Dust, Ash, Flight,” which appeared in Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Maaza, was awarded a 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, the Premio von Rezzori, the Premio il ponte, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places. She has taught at New York University, Princeton University, Northwestern University, and Queens College/CUNY, and Professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is at work on her third novel.
Sharon Dodua Otoo, born in London to Ghanaian parents, lives and works as a writer, curator, and political activist in Berlin. In 2020, she opened the Festival of German-Language Literature with a “Speech on Literature” entitled “Are Black People Allowed to Paint Flowers?” Her debut novel Adas Raum (2021) has been translated into several languages. Otoo is politically involved with the associations Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e.V., Phoenix e.V., and ADEFRA e.V. In 2022, she curated the Black literature festival “Resonanzen” (Resonances) in cooperation with Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen.
Doron Rabinovici, born in Tel Aviv in 1961, has lived in Vienna since 1964. He is a writer and historian. His work includes short stories, novels, essays and scholarly studies. Publications include, amongst others: Instanzen der Ohnmacht. Wien 1938-1945. Der Weg zum Judenrat; (Jüdischer Verlag bei Suhrkamp – 2000); Andernorts. Novel; (Suhrkamp – 2010) Neuer Antisemitismus? Fortsetzung einer globalen Debatte; edited together with Christian Heilbronn and Natan Sznaider, (suhrkamp edition – 2019); Die Einstellung. novel; (Suhrkamp – 2022); Die letzten Zeugen (The last Witnesses). A theater project of the Vienna Burgtheater in cooperation with Matthias Hartmann 2013 – 2015; Der siebente Oktober (The Seventh of October) a drama collage of a prologue and reports from victims of the Hamas massacre. For his work he has been awarded, among others, the Clemens Brentano Prize, the Jean Améry Award and the Anton Wildgans Prize.
Tess Lewis (moderator) is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Anne Weber, Lutz Seiler, Philippe Jaccottet and Montaigne. Her translation of Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion won the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many journals and newspapers. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow as well as a ‘scholar of note’ at the American Library in Paris, she serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and has curated the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English.
About the Friedrich Ulfers Prize 2024:
The Festival Neue Literatur partners proudly present the 2024 Friedrich Ulfers Prize to Edwin Frank, founder and editorial director of the New York Review of Books Classics series. The laudation will be delivered by Geoffrey O’Brien. Professor Friedrich Ulfers (NYU) will provide short remarks.
Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013. His Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel will be publsihed by FSG next month/ in November of this year.
Geoffrey O’Brien has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Went Like It Came (2023), and twelve books encompassing cultural history, memoir, and criticism, including Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties, The Phantom Empire, Sonata for Jukebox, and Arabian Nights of 1934. An editor at Library of America for 25 years, he retired as editor in chief in 2017. His writing on film, theater, music, and literature has appeared frequently in The New York Review of Books, Film Comment, Artforum, The Village Voice, and other periodicals.
The Friedrich Ulfers Prize was established in 2013 and is awarded annually by Deutsches Haus at New York University to a leading publisher, writer, critic, translator, or scholar who has championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States. The prize, which is endowed with a $5000 grant, has previously been awarded to Tess Lewis, Riky Stock, Jill Schoolman, Susan Bernofsky, Barbara Perlmutter, Barbara Epler, Burton Pike, Robert Weil, Sara Bershtel, and Carol Brown Janeway. The Friedrich Ulfers Prize is Festival Neue Literatur’s testimony to the rising importance of German-language literature in America.
Friedrich Ulfers was Associate Professor of German at New York University. In the past, he served as Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Science, the German Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of the NYU in Berlin Summer Program, and Director of Deutsches Haus at NYU. The recipient of NYU’s Distinguished Teaching Medal and Great Teacher Award, and two-time winner of the College of Arts and Science’s Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching, Ulfers has taught not only in the German Department but also in NYU’s interdisciplinary programs, offering courses that engage a range of interests, including literary theory, continental philosophy, and the relationships between science, literature, and philosophy. Friedrich Ulfers also served as a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he taught an intensive summer seminar on Nietzsche and 20th/21st Century Thought and gave a variety of lectures. From 2006-2009, he was Dean of the Media and Communications Division of the School, and in 2009, he was appointed Professor Emeritus. Friedrich Ulfers received the Heights College’s Faculty Hall of Fame Award and the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his commitment to German-American relations in the areas of culture and education.
About Festival Neue Literatur:
Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) was established in 2009 as a collaborative project of New York’s leading German-language cultural institutions, i.e. The Austrian Cultural Forum New York; the German Consulate General New York; the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York; Columbia University School of the Arts; Deutsches Haus at NYU; and the Goethe-Institut New York. Festival Neue Literatur is the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and U.S fiction together and is proud to provide New York audiences with access to exciting new literature from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S.
“Whose/Story Is History: Shifting the Perspective” is presented with additional support from the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.