Award-winning Austrian author Eva Menasse will visit Kent on 29 May 2014 for a translation workshop and reading. The event is organised by the Department of German with the support of the Centre for Modern European Literature, the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature.
Eva Menasse was born in Vienna and studied literature and history at Vienna University. She began her career as a journalist, and became an editor of Germany’s most prominent daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her first book was a collection of reports on the London trial of Holocaust denier David Irving. She left the paper to write her first novel, Vienna (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2006), and now lives and works in Berlin as a freelance author. The English translation by Anthea Bell of Vienna (Orion, 2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK.
Menasse combines a witty, almost anecdotal style with compelling characters and a keen eye for the grotesque in ‘everyday’ life. Her works are often strongly autobiographical; drawing on stories of her own part-Jewish family, she tells Austria’s history by probing the cracks in its modern-day veneer.
The workshop we will look at excerpts from Menasse’s collection of short stories Lässliche Todsünden [Forgivable Deadly Sins] (Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag, 2009), which has yet to appear in English. Copies of the passages to be discussed and literal translations are available from the organisers in advance. Please contact Dr Deborah Holmes, Head of German, via email: d.c.holmes@kent.ac.uk
The workshop is open to anyone interested in literary translation, regardless of their level of German. Details of the translation workshop and reading may be found on the page here: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/german/events
Image courtesy of Stefan Olah.