Literaturlenz
February 25, 2015
2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Literaturlenz: New Literature in German
With Readings by:
Born in 1967 in Siegen to Iranian parents, Navid Kermani studied Islamic Studies, Philosophy, and Theatre in Cologne and Bonn. He received his doctorate and completed his professorial dissertation (Habilitation) in Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn. Kermani is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry as well as the Hamburg Academy of Sciences and has been the recipient of numerous awards for his writing. In 2009 Kermani has given both the Frankfurt Poetic Lectures (2009) and the Gottingen Poetic Lectures (2011 ). His published works are wide-ranging and include academic works on Islam, short story collections and vignettes, a children’s book, novels, and reportage. In spring 2014 he was the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth University, and in May 2014, he gave the keynote speech for the 65th anniversary of the German constitution in the Bundestag.
Anna Weidenholzer was born in 1984 in Linz and now lives in Vienna. She studied Comparative Literature in Vienna and Wroclaw, Poland. Weidenholzer has published extensively in literary magazines and anthologies and has won many awards, such as the Alfred-Gesswein-Prize (2009), the Residency Stipend at the Schloss Wiepersdorf (2011 ), the State Grant for Literature (2011 /2012), Stadtschreiberin of Kitzbühel (2012) and the ReinhardPriessnitz-Prize (2013 ). Her debut novel Der Platz des Hundes (2010) earned her a nomination for the European
Festival of the Debut Novel in Kiel in 2011. Her novel Der Winter tut den Fischen gut was nominated in the fiction category of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2013.
Jonas Lüscher was born 1976 in Switzerland. After studying primary school education in Bern, he worked in Munich as a dramaturge in film production and development. In 2005, he began studying philosophy. After receiving his degree, he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Technology-Theology-Natural Sciences at the University of Munich and taught ethics at the National School of Economics. He is currently writing his PhD dissertation at the ETH Zurich on the importance of narratives for describing social complexity within the context of Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism. In 2012-2013 he spent 9 months as a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University. After the publication of his first novel, The Barbarians’ Spring (2013 ), a bitter satire about the financial crisis, the German Weekly Die Zeit referred to him as the “literary discovery of the year.”
Literaturlenz is a joint effort of the Goethe-Institut Chicago, the Embassy of Switzerland, and the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York.
Sponsored by the Department of Germanic Studies, the Religious Studies Program, and the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics.
Date posted
Jun 9, 2020
Date updated
Jun 9, 2020