Announcements

Film
05/09/12 - 05/15/12
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
New York, NY 10014
Tel.: +1 (212) 727-8110

It's not often that we point our readers to films here, but a new work on a great contemporary German writer warrants an exception. W.G. Sebald, who died prematurely in a car accident at the end of 2001, created some of the most stunning works to come out of the German-speaking world in recent years. Now Grant Gee has released Patience (After Sebald), a film essay on "landscape, art, history, life and loss", which looks at Sebald's body of literature and its influence.

Born in Allgau, Germany in 1944, W.G. Sebald studied in Germany, Switzerland and the UK, settling in the UK in 1970. With the publication of The Emigrants in 1992, Sebald became an international author publishing, among other titles, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz, and his work continues to exert an influence on artists, writers and filmmakers.

Director Grant Gee received the Grierson Award for Joy Division and directed the Radiohead documentary, Meeting People is Easy. Patience, shown at the 2011 New York Film Festival, is structured around a walk through quintessential Sebald territory, coastal East Anglia, which he portrayed in The Rings of Saturn. The film features Adam Philips, Robert Macfarlane, Rick Moody and Tacita Dean. Novelist Moody, a friend of Sebald, will introduce Patience at Film Forum on Wednesday, May 9, at 8:20pm. On May 11, at 8:20pm, Lynne Sharon Schwartz will do the introduction.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, with its £10,000 award that is split equally between author and translator, has announced its shortlist. The group of five candidate includes Judith Hermann's novel, Alice, translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo and published by The Clerkenwell Press.

The winning title will be announced on May 14. This year's other shortlisted titles, translated from the Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian and Chinese, are Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld, From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón, The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, and Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke.

Among the shortlist of nominees for the Best Translated Book Award for poetry are two small press editions by German authors. Anja Utler's münden — entzüngeln, for which Utler was awarded the Leonce-und-Lena Prize for Poetry, has been translated by Kurt Beal for Burning Deck as engulf -- enkindle.

Also nominated is Uljana Wolf's falsche freunde, in a translation by Susan Bernofsky titled False Friends and published by Ugly Duckling Press.

The fiction and poetry winners of the Best Translated Book Award will be announced on Friday, May 4, at 6:00pm, at McNally Jackson Books in SoHo as part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. Each winning author and translator will receive a $5,000 cash prize.

The UK's 'Independent' Foreign Fiction Prize honors modern writing in translation and is unique in that its £10,000 purse is divided equally between author and translator. This year's longlist, representing 12 languages and gleaned from 100 entries, includes two titles translated from the German: Judith Hermann's short story collection, Alice, from translator Margot Bettauer Dembo (The Clerkenwell Press) and Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella, in translation by Anthea Bell (Peirene Press).

The shortlist for the prize, comprising six books, will be announced on April 12, with the final winner revealed at an awards ceremony on May 14.

The jury of the Leipzig Book Prize has announced its nominees for the 2012 Prizes, to be awarded in three categories -- Fiction, Non-Fiction and Translation into German -- during this year's Leipzig Book Fair, which takes place from March 15 to 18.

The five fiction nominees are Anna Katharina Hahn for Am Schwarzen Berg (Suhrkamp), Thomas von Steinaecker for Das Jahr, in dem ich aufhörte, mir Sorgen zu machen, und anfing zu träumen (S. Fischer Verlag), Sherko Fatah for Ein weißes Land (Luchterhand Literaturverlag), Wolfgang Herrndorf for Sand (Rowohlt Berlin), and Jens Sparschuh for Im Kasten (Kiepenheuer & Witsch).

Non-fiction nominees are: Jörg Baberowski for Verbrannte Erde. Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt (C.H. Beck), Carolin Emcke for Wie wir begehren (S. Fischer Verlag), Manfred Geier for Aufklärung. Das europäische Projekt (Rowohlt), Lothar Müller for Weiße Magie. Die Epoche des Papiers (Carl Hanser Verlag), and Wilfried F. Schoeller for Alfred Döblin. Eine Biographie (Carl Hanser Verlag).

Audio and reading samples from all works can be found at the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair site.

Novelist, essayist, children's book author and translator Michael Stavarič is the recipient of this year's Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preis, an award presented to a non-German-born author who writes in German. Stavarič, born in 1972 in Brno (today the Czech Republic), has lived in Austria for three decades. His most recent novel is Brenntage, published by C. H. Beck.

The prize, which comes with a 15,000 Euro purse, will be awarded on March 1 in the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche in the Residenz München.

Readings/Discussions
02/10/12-02/12/12
Various NY venues
In English and German
Free and open to the public

The third annual Festival Neue Literatur begins this Friday and continues through Sunday at venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including Deutsches Haus at Columbia University, powerHouse Arena, Deutsches Haus NYU and McNally Jackson Books. This year's author's, representing some of the best new talent in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, are Inka Parei and Larissa Boehning from Germany, Monica Cantieni and Catalin Dorian Florescu from Switzerland and Austrians Linda Stift and Erwin Uhrmann. They will be joined by US authors Chris Adrian and Francisco Goldman at powerHouse Arena and McNally Jackson, respectively

The festival website provides a complete schedule of events, bios of the authors and samples of their work in English. All events are free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required for the Deutsches Haus NYU event on Sunday, February 12.