I would like to thank the judges of the Heine Preis for allowing me to receive this honour, to be thought of as a good writer by people of intellectual rigour and good judgment is
This year a breath of fresh air circulated around the award of literature prizes in France. The good news: the accolades went to a high number of young female writers. The bad news
Laurent Mauvignier is among France’s leading contemporary writers. Readers who take up one of his novels immediately notice that actually there is a quite exceptional narrator at
Exile is a grave. Historical epochs, things and peoples vanish in it. Yet, often they are suddenly back in the public consciousness, if for example the ancestors open an old chest.
In his novel Compass, the well-travelled polyglot and writer Mathias Enard develops a counter-programme to the populist mainstream of being ‘anti-’open borders. The two main c
All those who may now feel caught in a dreadful predicament – on the one hand, wanting to embrace the necessity of a united Europe, while on the other no longer finding any argum
Everything always begins with a single look… A look that completely changes the world and suddenly fills it with the most incredible illusions… Yes, the world was no lo
Between Two Cultures The favourite prediction about the ‘conflict of cultures’ is an ideological construct that quickly loses obvious meaning when applied to everyday life. Ras
Dreams of Rivers and Seas A central image in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is the echo experienced in the Marabar Caves. The acoustics of these spaces turn any noise made wit
“Then Sara got up, her ponytail shining on one side of her neck and then the other. She skipped to the cage, like a little girl. Her back to us, rising up on tiptoes, she opened
