LITERARY FESTIVAL | PANEL | FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR: WORDS WITH WRITERS
FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR brings New York audiences new writing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, as the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and American fiction. Taking place from March 2-5, the 2017 festival marks the first-ever convening of queer-centric, German-language texts in the United States, as festival authors take on this year’s theme “Queer as Volk.”
The eighth edition of FNL is curated by Peter Blackstock, senior editor at Grove Atlantic and features the following authors: Jürgen Bauer and Marlen Schachinger (Austria); Fabian Hischmann and Antje Rávic Strubel (Germany); Zora del Buono and Simon Froehling (Switzerland); and Darryl Pinckney and Francine Prose (United States). The celebrated American novelist Garth Greenwell will be the chair of Festival Neue Literatur 2017.
In “Words with Writers”, selected students from Columbia University, Pratt Institute, New York University, Vassar College, and Hunter College take on FNL authors in a lightning round of literary interviews.
Featuring authors Fabian Hischmann, Antje Rávic Strubel, Jürgen Bauer, Marlen Schachinger, Simon Froehling, and Zora del Buono as well as students Tibo Halsberghe, Isabelle Burden, Sade Murphy, Marie-Luise Goldmann, Andrew Willet, and Kathriana Kengni; moderated by festival curator Peter Blackstock.
With special thanks to Professor Susan Bernofsky of Columbia University for her integral role in the organization of this event!
The event is free of charge and in English. RSVPs are required due to limited seating. Please register here.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Antje Rávic-Strubel is based in Potsdam and works as a writer, translator and literary critic. Drawing on her youth in East Germany, her fiction deals with issues of identity and womanhood in contemporary Europe. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Herman Hesse Award, the Marburg Literature Award and the Academy of Arts Award. Her most recent novel In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens (2016), follows a handful of women as they travel throughout Europe and to the American coasts. Woven through their adventurous travels are discoveries of new sexualities, dissolutions of classical ideas of love, and explorations of the delineations between nationalities and sensualities.
Fabian Hischmann studied creative writing and cultural journalism in Hildesheim and at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, and is now based in Berlin. He has worked as a dramaturg in theaters in Heidelberg and Freiburg. While his short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies Am Ende schmeißen wir mit Gold (2014) is his debut novel. The coming-of-age story follows a neurotic twentysomething, Max, as he confronts the vagaries of his sexual orientation, pursuing both a man and a woman. At the same time, it explores questions of mourning, intergenerational discord, and the transformation of identity. It was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2014.
Marlen Schachinger studied Comparative Literature and German Studies in Vienna and Paris. She is the director of the “Institut für narrative Kunst” where she teaches methods of writing and criticism. She is particularly interested in the intersections of literary theory and feminist literary history, and her work has been lauded with numerous prizes and awards. Schachinger’s 2013 novel ¡Leben! (2013) is set in the Nazi era. It traces the friendship of two women, whose only similarity, it seems, is that they are both gay: Lea is a young immigrant from Sarajevo, while Marie, decades older, has lost her homosexual husband to a concentration camp and her girlfriend to a sham marriage with a Nazi officer. ¡Leben! explores the secrets of the living and the dead, the hushed sex crimes of the Nazi era, and both the experience and remembrance of war.
Born in 1981, Jürgen Bauer works as a writer and journalist in Vienna. He majored in theater studies and published his book No Escape, about the theatre director Barrie Kosky, in 2008. He was a participant in the New Writing program of the Burgtheater Vienna. In 2013, he published his first novel, Das Fenster zur Welt; his latest novel, Was wir fürchten, was published in 2015. He was a writer in residence at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin in the summer of 2015.
Zora del Buono was born in Zurich in 1962 and studied architecture at ETH Zurich and at the University of the Arts Berlin. Following a stint in set design, she co-founded the magazine mare – the journal of the seas and began work as a freelance writer in 2008. Since 2010, she has taught journalism at various universities in the US, Germany and Switzerland. Her 2016 novel Hinter Büschen, an eine Hauswand gelehnt takes place on a college campus with a thriving LGBT community. Amid the chaos brought on by Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, the narrator finds herself entangled in multiple relationships. The book dismantles barriers between young and old, queer and straight, and secrecy and disclosure.
Simon Froehling was born in 1978 in Switzerland to an Australian mother and a Swiss father. He saw about ten of his full-length theater and radio plays produced or published in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Australia, before graduating from the Swiss Literature Institute at the Bern University of the Arts in 2009. His BA thesis included the novel Lange Nächte Tag, which was published to critical acclaim by Bilgerverlag in Zurich the following year. Simon has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Network cultural prize 2014 for his contribution to queer arts. His latest publication was an audio play for children, produced by Swiss national broadcaster SRF Radio 1 in 2016.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Peter Blackstock is a senior editor at Grove Atlantic in New York. His list includes fiction, nonfiction, and drama, with a focus on international writing and books in translation. Among his authors are the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Academy Award-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg, and the Booker-longlisted writer Eve Harris, alongside house authors like Will Self, Tom Stoppard, and the estates of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In translation, his authors include Julia Franck, Charlotte Roche, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Andrus Kivirähk, Annick Cojean, Ismail Kadare, Isabelle Saporta, and Sayaka Murata. He has participated in editor fellowships in Jerusalem and Frankfurt, has been a judge for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants and the Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators, and is part of the American Jury of New Books in German. He studied German and Russian at Oxford University and now lives in Queens.