I would like to thank the judges of the Heine Preis for allowing me to receive this honour, to be…
ELit
This year a breath of fresh air circulated around the award of literature prizes in France. The good news: the…
Laurent Mauvignier is among France’s leading contemporary writers. Readers who take up one of his novels immediately notice that actually…
Exile is a grave. Historical epochs, things and peoples vanish in it. Yet, often they are suddenly back in the…
In his novel Compass, the well-travelled polyglot and writer Mathias Enard develops a counter-programme to the populist mainstream of being ‘anti-’open…
All those who may now feel caught in a dreadful predicament – on the one hand, wanting to embrace the…
Everything always begins with a single look… A look that completely changes the world and suddenly fills it with the…
Between Two Cultures The favourite prediction about the ‘conflict of cultures’ is an ideological construct that quickly loses obvious meaning…
Dreams of Rivers and Seas A central image in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is the echo experienced in…
“Then Sara got up, her ponytail shining on one side of her neck and then the other. She skipped to…
A country, Abistan; a city, Qodsabad; a simplified language, Abilang; a prophet, Abi, the sacred tyrant who represents God on…
Asked to investigate how the UK receives the work of the Slovenian writer Drago Jančar, I find myself asking an…