Langer Transit. A Reading with Maja Haderlap and Tess Lewis
- Event type
- Other Events
- Speakers
- Maja Haderlap (Austria), Tess Lewis (USA), Andrea Capovilla (ILCS, University of London)
- Event dates
- Contact
- jane.lewin@sas.ac.uk 020 7862 8966
Maja Haderlap’s poetry collection langer transit continues to explore themes of her novel Engel des Vergessens: shifting topographies and inner topographies, Slovenian history and myths, anti-fascist resistance, language and identity. Hers is a poetry of transitions, charting the move from one country or language to another, from adolescence to adulthood, from trust and intimacy to distance, from rootedness to estrangement, but also from estrangement to a sense of community and home.
Born into the Slovenian-speaking minority of Carinthia, Austria, Maja Haderlap writes poetry, libretti and fiction in Slovenian and in German. She was awarded the 2011 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Rauriser Prize for Literature for Engel des Vergessens, published in Tess Lewis’s translation as Angel of Oblivion. Haderlap was awarded the Austrian Arts Prize for Literature in 2019 and the Christine Lavant Prize in 2021.
Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Walter Benjamin, Peter Handke, Alois Hotschnig, Julya Rabinowich, and Doron Rabinovici. She was awarded the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2022, she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Her translation of Haderlap’s poetry collection langer transit was published in 2022 as distant transit and is a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Maja Haderlap and Tess Lewis will read and discuss selected poems in German and in Lewis’s translation. The reading will be followed by a Q&A, moderated by Andrea Capovilla (Director, Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature & Culture at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London).
The bilingual reading will take place at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 28 Rutland Gate, SW7 1PQ. Attendance is open to all and free, but advance online registration is required.
This event also forms part of the conference Ingeborg Bachmann Now taking place on 18 and 19 May 2023 at the University of London Senate House, for which separate registration is required: https://ilcs.sas.ac.uk/events/reading-bachmann-now
Images: Maja Haderlap (© Max Amann) and Tess Lewis (© Sarah Schatz).
