The theme of the 2017 festival, curated by Peter Blackstock, senior editor at Grove Atlantic, is QUEER AS VOLK.
As queer people face a hazardous political climate both in the United States and in Europe, stories about the LGBTQ community become all the more critical. As do the questions: How do queer stories reach readers? To what extent is gay writing still subversive? And how do we ensure that the stories of LGBTQ people are told in a time of rising reactionary sentiment? The works of fiction featured at this year’s festival celebrate the diversity of LGBTQ experiences.
From the coming-of-age story of a young bisexual man living in the Black Forest, to a novel exploring the lives of lesbian and gay people in Austria during the Nazi period, to the tale of a Swiss couple reeling from a positive HIV diagnosis, the featured works form a cross-section of the LGBTQ spectrum. Simultaneously joyous, heart- wrenching, sexual and radical, these books showcase queer experiences with deep emotion and great literary flair.
Words With Writers Friday, March 3 at 6:00 PM Austrian Cultural Forum New York 11 E 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022
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 all six German-language authors and moderated by festival curator Peter Blackstock, senior editor at Grove Atlantic.
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 Willett, 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.
Translation at the Margins Saturday, March 4 at 12:00 PM Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery, New York, NY 10012
Join Festival Neue Literatur for an intimate conversation about literature in translation with NYC’s celebrated literary editors, translators, and writers, who will discuss the importance of translating LGBTQ voices, voices of people of color, voices of women, and voices of writers from countries recently affected by the U.S. immigration ban.
Panelists: 1. John Keene 2. Rivka Galchen and Susan Bernofsky 3. Sara Khalili and Michel Moushabek 4. John Freeman and Valeria Luiselli
Moderated by translator and Guggenheim Fellow Tess Lewis.
The event is free of charge and in English. RSVPs are required due to limited seating. Please register here.
Born This Way: Writing the Personal Saturday, March 4 at 6:00 PM powerHouse Books 28 Adams Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
As Virginia Woolf put it in A Room of One’s Own: “Sometimes women do like women.” Bringing queer stories to a straight world is a task that often falls to LGBTQ writers. But should LGBTQ writers feel an obligation to write fiction inspired by their own experiences? This panel explores the burdens of representation and the role of personal and literary influences, showing how LGBTQ lives come into literature.
Featuring Zora del Buono, Antje Rávic Strubel, and Jürgen Bauer, Darryl Pinckney, and moderated by Geoff Mak of The Offing Magazine. The event is free of charge and in English. RSVPs are required due to limited seating. Please register here.
The Author's Voice Sunday, March 5 at 2:00 PM Deutsches Haus at NYU 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003
The six German-language authors of Festival Neue Literatur pair up with New York City actors to give a sampling from their work, providing a taste of new writing from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
Featuring Jürgen Bauer, Zora del Buono, Simon Froehling, Fabian Hischmann, Marlen Schachinger, and Antje Rávic Strubel, and moderated by the festival curator Peter Blackstock. English excerpts read by actors.
The event is free of charge and in English. RSVPs are required due to limited seating. Please email [email protected].
Silence Is Violence: LGBTQ Writing in a Fracturing Political Climate Sunday, March 5 at 6:00 PM McNally Jackson Books 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
Larry Kramer once said: “I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.” This panel promises a lively discussion of the intersection between LGBTQ writing and politics, from HIV/AIDS activism, to class and race identity, to gay persecution both historical and contemporary, exploring what it means to be a sexual minority in today’s political climate.
Featuring Marlen Schachinger, Simon Froehling, Fabian Hischmann, Francine Prose, and moderated by William Johnson of Lambda Literary.
The event is free of charge and in English. RSVPs are required due to limited seating. Please register here.
Participants
Jürgen Bauer
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.
Please read an excerpt from Das Fenster zur Welt in a translation by Marshall Yarbrough here.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New YorkBorn This Way: Writing the Personal at powerHouse BooksThe Author's Voice at Deutsches Haus at NYU
Marlen Schachinger
Marlen Schachinger was born in Upper Austria in 1970, and currently lives and works as a freelance writer in Upper Austria and Vienna. She is the recipient of a number of literature awards and grants, most recently the 2016 Upper Austrian Honorary Prize as well as LiterarMechana’s anniversary grant. She has published prose, poetry and essays in national and international literary magazines.
Since 2000 Schachinger has written a number of books, the most recent of which include Martiniloben (2016), Unzeit (2016), Albors Asche (2015), denn ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach (2013), and ¡Leben! (2013). She also participated in Marlen Schachinger & Betty Paoli: Women Authors Celebrating Women Authors and wrote the textbook Werdegang (2014). Her recent anthologies include übergrenzen (2015). Please read an excerpt from ¡Leben! in a translation by Tess Lewis here. www.marlen-schachinger.com Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New YorkThe Author's Voice at Deutsches Haus at NYUSilence Is Violence: LGBTQ Writing in a Fracturing Political Climate at McNally Jackson Books
Fabian Hischmann
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.
Please read an excerpt from Am Ende schmeißen wir mit Gold in a translation by Tim Mohr here.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New YorkThe Author's Voice at Deutsches Haus at NYUSilence Is Violence: LGBTQ Writing in a Fracturing Political Climate at McNally Jackson Books
Antje Rávic Strubel
Born in Potsdam, Antje Rávic Strubel studied American and German literature and psychology at Potsdam University and New York University. An author and essayist, her novels include: In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens (S.Fischer 2016), Sturz der Tage in die Nacht (S.Fischer 2011), which was nominated for the German Book Prize, Kältere Schichten der Luft (S. Fischer, 2007), which was shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Award and won the Herman Hesse Award and Rheingau Literature Award; Tupolew 134 (C.H. Beck, 2004), for which Strubel received the Marburg Literature Award and the Bremen Promotional Literature Award; Fremd Gehen: Ein Nachtstück (DTV, 2002) and Unter Schnee (DTV, 2001) which was translated into English under the title Snowed Under (Red Hen Press, 2008) and awarded with the Academy of Arts Award.
She is the German translator of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking (Claasen, 2006) and a compilation of essays entitled We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (Claasen, 2008) as well as Blue Nights (Claasen, 2010). She is also the German translator of Lucia Berlin’s Manual for Cleaning Women (Arche, 2015) and the upcoming second volume of her works (Arche, 2017). Her translation from Swedish of Karolina Ramqvists Vita Staden was published in 2016 (Ullstein).
She teaches regularly at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut at the University of Leipzig, taught Master Classes in writing at the Berliner Festspiele and the Federal Academy for Cultural Education Wolfenbüttel as well as workshops in Creative Writing and Translation at UCI Irvine, UCONN and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland.
Please read an excerpt from In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens in a translation by Zaia Alexander here. www.antjestrubel.de Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New YorkBorn This Way: Writing the Personal at powerHouse BooksThe Author's Voice at Deutsches Haus at NYU
Zora del Buono
Zora del Buono was born in Zurich in 1962 and grew up either there as well as in Bari (Italy). She studied architecture at ETH Zurich and at the University of the Arts Berlin, and post-graduated in set design at the Technical College Rosenheim. In 1997, she was a co- founder and cultural editor of the magazine mare – The journal of the seas. From 2002 until 2008 she was deputy chief editor at mare, and since then ha been functioning as an interim editor. In 2008, she started her career as a freelance writer. Since 2010, she also teaches journalism as a guest professor at different universities in the USA, Germany and Switzerland.
Her most recent publications include Hinter Büschen, an eine Hauswand gelehnt (2016), Das Leben der Mächtigen – Reisen zu alten Bäumen (2015), and Gotthard (2015).
Please read an excerpt from Gotthard in a translation by Sophie Duvernoy here.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New YorkBorn This Way: Writing the Personal at powerHouse BooksThe Author's Voice at Deutsches Haus at NYU
Simon Froehling
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.
Please read an excerpt from Lange Nächte Tag in a translation by William Martin here.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New YorkThe Author's Voice at Deutsches Haus at NYUSilence Is Violence: LGBTQ Writing in a Fracturing Political Climate at McNally Jackson Books
Darryl Pinckney
Darryl Pinckney, a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of two works of non-fiction, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002) and Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (2012), and two works of fiction, High Cotton (1992) and, most recently, Black Deutschland. He has worked on Robert Wilson's productions of The Forest, Orlando, Time Rocker, The Old Woman, and Garrincha: A Musical of the Streets.
Events: Born This Way: Writing the Personal at powerHouse Books
Francine Prose
Francine Prose is the author of twenty-one works of fiction, including, most recently, the highly-acclaimed, New York Times bestselling novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club: Paris, 1932.
Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like A Writer.
The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in New York City.
Image credit: © Christine Jean Chambers
Events: Silence Is Violence: LGBTQ Writing in a Fracturing Political Climate at McNally Jackson Books
Susan Bernofsky
Susan Bernofsky is an author and translator and directs the program Literary Translation at Columbia in the MFA Writing Program at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Among her many published translations are retranslations of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (Modern Library, 2006), Franz Kafka's classic black comedy of nightmarish transformation, The Metamorphosis (Norton, 2014), and Jeremias Gotthelf's 19th century tale of horror, The Black Spider (NYRB Classics, 2013). She specializes in the work of the great Swiss- German modernist author Robert Walser – she has translated eight of his books, including Microscripts, Berlin Stories, The Walk, and Looking at Pictures. Her 2014 translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her most recent translation is the novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada.
She blogs about translation at www.translationista.com and is currently at work on a biography of Robert Walser for Yale University Press. www.translationista.com Events: Translation at the Margins at Bowery Poetry Club
John Freeman
John Freeman is the founder of Freeman's. He has written two books of nonfiction, The Tyranny of Email and How to Read a Novelist, and a collection of poems, Maps, forthcoming in the fall. In 2014 he edited Tales of Two Cities, an anthology about inequality in New York, as a benefit for Housing Works. A follow-up volume, Tales of Two Americas, will be out in May. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York where he is Writer in Residence at NYU and teaches at The New School. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages.
Image credit: © Deborah Treisman
Events: Translation at the Margins at Bowery Poetry Club
Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen was born in Toronto but grew up largely in Oklahoma, where her father was a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and her mother, a computer programmer at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
Her writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) was a finalist for the Mercantile Library's John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the Canadian Writers' Trust's 2008 Fiction Prize, and Canada's Governor General's Award, and was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Galchen's short-story collection, American Innovations, was published in 2014 and received the Danuta Gleed Award for Short Stories. Galchen lives in New York, where she teaches writing at Columbia University.
Events: Translation at the Margins at Bowery Poetry Club
Sara Khalili
Sara Khalili is an editor and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her translations include Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi, The Book of Fate by Parinoush Saniee, and Rituals of Restlessness by Yaghoub Yadali. She has also translated several volumes of poetry by Forough Farrokhzad, Simin Behbahani, Siavash Kasraii, and Fereydoon Moshiri. Her short story translations have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, EPOCH, GRANTA, Words Without Borders, The Literary Review, PEN America, Witness, and Consequence.
Events: Translation at the Margins at Bowery Poetry Club
John Keene
John Keene is Chair of African American and African Studies and Associate Professor of English and AAAS at Rutgers University- Newark. A former member of the Dark Room Writers Collective of Cambridge and Boston and a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, he is author of the novel Annotations, the poetry collection (with artist Christopher Stackhouse) Seismosis, the art book (with photographer Nicholas Muellner) GRIND, and the poetry chapbook Playland. His most recent work of fiction, Counternarratives, received an American Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award in Fiction in 2016. www.ncas.rutgers.edu Events: Translation at the Margins at Bowery Poetry Club
Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Africa. She is the author of Sidewalks, a book of essays; and two novels, Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth. The latter novel, which was written in installments for workers in a juice factory, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Harlem.
Image credit: © Diego Berruecos
Events: Translation at the Margins at Bowery Poetry Club
Michel S. Moushabeck
Michel S. Moushabeck is a writer, editor, publisher, and musician of Palestinian descent. He is the founder of Interlink Publishing, a 30- year-old, Massachusetts-based, independent publishing house specializing in fiction-in- translation, history, cultural guides and award- winning international cookbooks. He is the author of several books including Kilimanjaro: A Photographic Journey to the Roof of Africa (The Armchair Traveller, London, 2011), and A Brief Introduction to Arabic Music (Saqi Books, London, 2017). Most recently, he co-edited the winter issue of the Massachusetts Review focusing on Mediterranean literature and contributed a piece to Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). He is the recipient of NYU’s Founder’s Day Award for outstanding scholarship (1981), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Alex Odeh Award (2010) and The Palestinian Heritage Foundation Achievement Award (2011). He serves on the board of directors of Media Education Foundation and on the board of trustees of The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), an annual literary prize administered by the UK’s Booker Prize Foundation. He is also a founding member of the Boston-based Layaali Arabic Music Ensemble. He has performed at concert halls worldwide and plays riqq, tabla and daff on the music soundtrack of an award- winning BBC documentary on Islam, which aired as part of the series The People's Century. His recording credits include two albums: Lost Songs of Palestine and Folk Songs and Dance Music from Turkey and the Arab World. He teaches percussion at Amherst College and lectures frequently on Arabic music and literature-in-translation. He plays music almost daily; is an avid hiker and mountain climber; and is a rather obsessive collector jazz and world music, world percussion instruments, books, old maps, and contemporary art.
Events: Translation at the Margins at Bowery Poetry Club
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist and performer whose books include Chelsea Girls, I Must Be Living Twice, Selected Poems and The Importance of Being Iceland/Travel Essays in Art. Afterglow (A Dog Memoir) will be out in Fall 2017. In 1992 Myles conducted an openly female write-in campaign for president of the United States. They have received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, The Foundation for Contemporary Art and in 2016 was awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in Art Writing. Myles is also a television poet. Their poems have appeared in seasons 2 and 3 of the Emmy-winning TV show Transparent. They live in New York and Marfa TX.
Photo credit: Peggy O'Brien www.eileenmyles.com
Isabelle Burden
Isabelle Burden has a Bachelor's degree in Literature and German Studies from Johns Hopkins University and is currently working towards her MFA in Fiction Writing at Columbia. A New York Native, she has lived and worked in Germany and has completed projects as a freelance translator for clients including the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, and most recently, Rimini Protokoll’s Top Secret International show at the Brooklyn Museum.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New York
Marie-Luise Goldmann
Marie-Luise Goldmann is a second year PhD- student in the NYU German Department. Before joining the Doctoral Program, Marie- Luise received her B.A. in Philosophy and German Literature from Humboldt-University Berlin. She is interested in feminism and queerness and likes to deal with these topics in her academic as well as journalistic works.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New York
Tibo Halsberghe
Tibo Halsberghe is a first year MFA fiction student at Columbia University. They grew up in Belgium speaking Flemish and French and went on to study German, English, Hungarian, and Italian. Before starting the graduate studies program they ran a B&B in Holland and taught English to refugees in London and Sydney. As a volunteer at the National Alliance for Mental Illness in New York one of their main objectives is to explore writing as a practice for sharing experiences and building community.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New York
Kathriana Kengni
Kathriana Kengni grew up in two separate countries- she was born in the west African country of Cameroon and moved to the US when she was 15. Having a background in the cultures of both countries, Kengni developed an interest in international relations, especially in the German American transatlantic relationship through culture studies, literature, and Arts. This inspired her to enroll at Hunter
College as a German major, and International Relations minor. When Kengni is not studying, she is traveling, generally spendig summer breaks in Germany to experience the country through the locals and improve her language skills.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New York
Janine Wahrendorf
Janine Wahrendorf is a PhD-student in the German Department at Rutgers University. Before joining the Doctoral Program, Janine received her B.A. in Media and Theater Studies as well as her M.A. in Media Studies from Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. She has a particular interest in coming-of-age narratives in literature and film, including in particular those with a queer perspective.
Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New York
Andrew Willett
Andrew Willett is a senior at Vassar college with a double major in German Studies and Cognitive Science. He has a deep interest in and commitment to the individual, specifically their goals and how they construct meaning. This perspective fuels his academic, political, and personal pursuits, both shaping and being shaped by his identity as a queer man with German cultural heritage. Events: Words With Writers at Austrian Cultural Forum New York
Chairperson
Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Iowa City.
www.garthgreenwell.com
Curator
Peter Blackstock
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.
Translators
Zaia Alexander
Zaia Alexander is a writer and literary translator based in Potsdam. She holds a PhD in German Studies from UCLA and was formerly Director of Programs at Villa Aurora. She teaches seminars in literary translation, reviews books in translation, was PEN Center USA Translation Jury Chair (2007); awarded Lannan Residency for translation in Marfa, Texas. Publications include: “Primo Levi and Translation” in the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi; “Danube Exodus” in Future Cinema (MIT); “Primo Levi and Lagersprache” in Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps (Bloomsbury). Authors translated include: Terezia Mora, Thomas Hettche, Monika Maron, Antje Rávic Strubel, Marion Poschmann, Norbert Gstrein, Julia Schoch, and Arno Geiger.
Sophie Duvernoy
Sophie Duvernoy is a translator and editor based in New Haven, CT. She is the recipient of the 2015 Gutekunst Prize for young translators, and is currently at work on a translation of a 1931 satirical novel by Gabriele Tergit, under contract with NYRB Classics. In addition to working as a translator, Sophie is a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, focusing on twentieth-century literature and intellectual thought.
Tess Lewis
Tess Lewis’s translations from French and German include works by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, Alois Hotschnig, Lutz Seiler, Philippe Jaccottet, and Jean-Luc Benoziglio. She has been awarded grants from PEN and the NEA, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York Translation Prize for her translation of the novel Angel of Oblivion by FNL author Maja Haderlap, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and writes essays on European Literature for a number of journals and newspapers including The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The American Scholar, and Bookforum. In 2014 and 2015, Ms. Lewis curated Festival Neue Literature. www.tesslewis.org
William Martin
W. Martin is an editor, teacher, and translator from German and Polish. His published translations include Michał Witkowski's Lovetown (Portobello), Natasza Goerke's Farewells to Plasma (Twisted Spoon), and Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives (Overlook). He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Translation and has served on fiction and poetry juries for the Best Translated Book Award and is currently on the jury of the Wisława Szymborska Award. He lives in Berlin and Jerusalem.
Tim Mohr
Tim Mohr is an award-winning translator of authors including Alina Bronsky, Stefanie de Velasco, Charlotte Roche, and Wolfgang Herrndorf. He has also collaborated on memoirs by musicians Duff McKagan, Gil Scott-Heron, and Paul Stanley, and is currently working with Joe Walsh. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and Playboy, among other publications, and his book Stirb nicht im Warteraum der Zukunft will be published by Heyne in March. Prior to starting his writing career he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin.
Marshall Yarbrough
Marshall Yarbrough translates from German. He has translated novels by bestselling authors Marc Elsberg (Blackout, Transworld, 2017) and Charlotte Link (The Unknown Guest and The Rose Gardener, Blanvalet, 2014 and 2015). His translations of work by Anna Katharina Hahn and Wolfram Lotz have appeared at n+1, InTranslation.org, and in the journal SAND. His critical writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Full-Stop.net, Tiny Mix Tapes, The Rumpus, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he is assistant music editor. He is a member of Cedilla & Co., a translators collective.
Moderators
William Johnson
William Johnson is the Program Director for Lambda Literary, an organization dedicated to prompting LGBTQ literature. He is a contributing arts and culture writer for CrushFanazine and the publisher of Mary Literary, a literary journal dedicated to showcasing queer/gay writings of artistic merit.
Geoff Mak
Geoff Mak is the author of the novel LORDS, forthcoming on Picador USA in February 2018. He served as the founding fiction editor of The Offing, and has contributed arts coverage to publications including Forbes, Guernica, Mask, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He divides his time between New York and Berlin.
Tess Lewis
Tess Lewis’s translations from French and German include works by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, Alois Hotschnig, Lutz Seiler, Philippe Jaccottet, and Jean-Luc Benoziglio. She has been awarded grants from PEN and the NEA, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York Translation Prize for her translation of the novel Angel of Oblivion by FNL author Maja Haderlap, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and writes essays on European Literature for a number of journals and newspapers including The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The American Scholar, and Bookforum. In 2014 and 2015, Ms. Lewis curated Festival Neue Literatur.
www.tesslewis.org
Reader
Festival Neue Literatur is pleased to present Volume 7 of its annual reader! Each year, Festival Neue Literatur commissions abbreviated English translations of the featured German-language writers. Overwhelmingly, the excerpts contained in festival readers are often the first time featured works have been translated into English.
Over the years, we have worked with the world’s most established and exciting literary translators to bring nearly forty works to new readers. This year’s Volume 7 features an introduction by Festival Curator Peter Blackstock. We hope you enjoy it.
Please download the reader here.