Looking Forward to 2025: Alex Roesch

19 December 2024

Translator Alex Roesch looking happy — Alex Rosch © Farideh Diehl

Having looked back at 2024’s crop of German books, we’re now doing a spot of sooth-saying with translator Alex Roesch.

As we step into 2025, German-language literature promises plenty to capture the imagination. A few upcoming titles have already caught my eye, each offering something refreshingly distinctive. From atmospheric stories set in untamed landscapes to expansive family sagas and finely drawn character studies, the year ahead looks set to deliver a compelling mix. Here’s a glimpse at four books on the horizon that, based on their manuscripts, are likely to generate plenty of conversation. It seems 2025 will be another quietly impressive year for German literature and well worth keeping an eye on.

Katharina Köller’s Wild Wuchern (Penguin) is as sharp and untamed as its mountain setting. Köller has a knack for conjuring tension out of thin air, and this novel is no exception.

Austrian playwright Katharina Köller’s second novel is an atmospheric and gripping story about family, isolation, and survival, set in the rugged Tyrolean mountains. It opens with Marie, a glamorous city-dweller from Vienna, fleeing her life in a state of panic. With nowhere else to turn, she heads to the remote mountain cabin of her cousin Johanna, whom she hasn’t seen since childhood. Their lives couldn’t be more different: while Marie has thrived in the elegance of urban life, Johanna has retreated from the world entirely, living alone among animals and wilderness.

As Marie attempts to adjust to Johanna’s harsh, ascetic way of life, the distance between them seems insurmountable. But the cabin soon becomes a pressure cooker, forcing both women to confront their pasts. We learn of Marie’s abusive husband and her flight from him, and of Johanna’s deep mistrust of people, shaped by wounds she has long kept hidden. When a violent storm strikes the mountain, their darkest secrets come to the surface, and they’re compelled to see each other – and themselves – in a new light.

Originally conceived as a two-person play (Windhöhe), which premiered in 2022, Wild Wuchern showcases Köller’s flair for taut dialogue and vivid, elemental storytelling. This is her second novel, following her award-winning debut Was ich im Wasser sah (What I Saw in the Water), and confirms her as a bold and exciting voice in contemporary Austrian literature.

Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár (Rowohlt) comes from a startlingly young author with a talent for the grand sweep of history. A debut this assured doesn’t come along often. I’ve always had a soft spot for multi-generational sagas, and Nelio Biedermann’s novel is a compelling new addition to the genre. Written by a 21-year-old Swiss author, this sweeping historical epic charts the fortunes of the Lázár family through the upheavals of 20th-century Europe. Beginning with Lajos von Lázár’s childhood on a fading aristocratic estate, the story spans three generations as the family navigates war, political turmoil, exile, and the painful decline of their legacy.

Set against the backdrop of two World Wars, the collapse of empires, and the rise of fascism and communism, the novel interweaves themes of loss, betrayal, forbidden love, and resilience. Biedermann’s writing is assured and evocative, capturing the emotional intricacies of his characters with remarkable sensitivity. His ability to blend personal and historical drama makes for an engaging and richly detailed narrative that brings the Lázárs’ story vividly to life.

Biedermann grew up on the shores of Lake Zurich and is currently studying German and Film Studies at the University of Zurich. Already a prize-winning author, he demonstrates a natural flair for storytelling and an impressively mature approach to his craft.

Joachim B. Schmidt’s Ósmann (Diogones) is as windswept and elemental as the Icelandic coast itself. Schmidt’s prose doesn’t just capture the landscape – it becomes part of it.

Set against the stark and mystical backdrop of Iceland, Ósmann is a mesmerising tale of one man’s extraordinary life. Schmidt, a Swiss-born author who has made Iceland his home, draws deeply on the country’s landscapes and folklore to tell the story of Jón Magnússon Ósmann, a ferryman whose life teeters between the mythical and the harsh realities of his rugged environment.

Jón’s days revolve around the water, ferrying people and goods, hunting seals, and battling the unpredictable forces of nature. A man of contradictions, he is gregarious yet devout, a poet and a drinker, generous to the poor but shaped by a life of toil. Yet as the tides turn against him, Jón is forced to confront challenges that threaten to overwhelm him, in both body and spirit. Schmidt combines human vulnerability with the timeless pull of myth, crafting a narrative that feels as vast and untamed as the Icelandic landscape itself.

Having emigrated to Iceland in 2007, Schmidt has become known for his atmospheric, immersive storytelling. With Ósmann, he delivers a deeply resonant story of struggle, resilience, and the enduring power of human connection.

Lastly, Tommie Goerz’s Im Schnee (Piper) is a masterclass in restraint, spinning a quiet tale of loss and memory that lingers long after you’ve closed the book.

Set against the snow-covered beauty of Bavaria, Im Schnee is a tender meditation on friendship, loss, and the passage of time. In a small village nestled in the mountains of Upper Franconia, Max, an 80-year-old widower, leads a solitary life in his sparse house by the railway line. With only a wood stove for warmth and no modern distractions, his days are spent in quiet reflection. As winter settles over the village, Max finds himself grieving the recent death of his lifelong friend, Schorsch. Determined to honour his memory, he sets out to do so in his own way, and through his reflections, we are drawn into a poignant exploration of companionship, community, and nostalgia.

This tender novella marks Goerz’s second foray into literary fiction after his highly regarded debut, Im Tal (2023). At just 159 pages, Im Schnee is modest in scope but brimming with atmosphere, vividly evoking the rhythms of small-village life and the quiet beauty of a Bavarian winter. While steeped in the customs and culture of its setting, its themes of human connection and change are universal. Goerz’s understated, lyrical style invites readers into an intimate, reflective world that lingers long after the story ends.

Alexandra Roesch is a bicultural, bilingual freelance translator and literary scout based in Frankfurt, Germany. An experienced translator of fiction and nonfiction, she has an MA in translation from the University of Bristol and was longlisted for the 2018 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.

Best German Books 2024: Siobhán Dowling

18 December 2024

Translator Siobhán Dowling, a white woman with brown hair and a blue top, on board a boat on a river. She's wearing sunglasses on top of her head and looking melancholy.

Here comes another list of translators’ top favourites from this year – this time from Siobhán Dowling.

Among many great reads this year (including Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti and Helene Bukowski’s Milchzähne), there were quite a few that dealt with aspects of life in the former East Germany as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath.

The best known is probably Jenny Erpenbeck’s International Booker Prize-winning Kairos (tr. Michael Hoffman), which depicts the increasingly abusive relationship between an older man and young woman, set amongst the cultural and artistic milieu of East Berlin just before and after the fall of the Wall.

Another, also nominated for the International Booker this year, Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming (tr. Katy Derbyshire), which provided a view from the other side of the tracks, focusing on the exploits of a gang of young boys-turned-men amid the chaos of late 80s and early 90s Leipzig.

And here are another three I enjoyed this year that grappled in some form with the ongoing fallout from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain:

A firm favourite was Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein by Sasha Marianna Salzmann. It tells the story of Lena and Tatjana, who grow up as Soviet citizens, and then find themselves in a new Ukraine that has descended into a place of corruption and gangsterism. The story evocatively describes a young Lena and her grandmother picking and selling hazelnuts, her summers in pioneer camps and her awkward flirtations as a reserved medical student. It also depicts Tatjana’s brush with crime and the mafia as her family struggles to be among the winners rather than the losers of the sudden chaotic upheaval. The story switches back and forth to explore their daughters’ lives and hybrid identities in Germany among the Soviet Jewish diaspora. Salzmann writes with dark humour, warmth and insight about human relationships, particularly those often fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. The English translation by Imogen Taylor, Glorious People, will be published by Pushkin Press in February.

Next is Gittersee, a novel set in 1976 and written by Charlotte Gneuß who was born in West Germany in 1992 to parents had left the GDR. This is a moving coming of age tale with an atmospheric rural setting. Karin is a 16 year old living in a village outside of Dresden whose boyfriend has escaped to the West, bringing her under the microscope of the creepy local Stasi officer. With an ineffectual father, belligerent grandmother and increasingly absent mother who finally leaves, Karin is left alone to navigate the complexities and dangers of collaboration and resistance. English rights have sold, so keep an eye out in future!

And finally there’s Anna Rabe’s Die Möglichkeit von Glück, a piece of autofiction about a young woman, Stine, who like Rabe, was born in 1986 in an East German coastal town. As part of the first post-Wall generation, the tumult and violence of that era forms the backdrop to her childhood and adolescence. And home is also a place of danger, where her mother, a true believer in the old system, inflicts an iron rule that verges on sadism. Stine eventually escapes to Berlin and grows increasingly estranged from her family. But when she decides to find out more about her adored grandfather, her journey through the archives uncovers more uncomfortable truths about her family’s past and the thread of violence that runs through it.

Siobhán Dowling is a journalist, editor and translator, who spent many years in Berlin and is now based in Dublin. She is currently studying for an MPhil in literary translation at Trinity College Dublin.

Best German Books 2024: Rachel Ward

17 December 2024

The translator Rachel Ward, a white woman with a brightly coloured summer scarf standing in front of a beautiful sunny garden, with a bird table in the background. — Translator Rachel Ward

The latest in our annual series of translators on their favourite German books of the year is Rachel Ward.

My German book of the year was Junge Frau, am Fenster stehend, Abendlicht, blaues Kleid [Young Woman Standing at the Window, Evening Light, Blue Dress] by Alena Schröder (dtv, 2021). Hannah is a student in Berlin who suddenly discovers that her elderly grandmother Evelyn might be the heir to a painting, possibly an unknown Vermeer, that had been secreted away by her birth mother Senta, when her Jewish second husband’s art gallery was expropriated by the Nazis. It had been on my radar for a while and finally made it to the top of the ITI German Network book club’s reading list. It’s part art thriller, but like a lot of the books we’ve read lately (e.g. Mareike Fallwickl’s Die Wut die bleibt), there’s a lot about motherhood and the way patterns of behaviour get repeated, or don’t. Evelyn was a particularly fascinating character, and her trying to deal with loving Trude, the aunt who brought her up, despite everything she’d done was very moving. I enjoyed the fact that it didn’t have a tidy, pat ending – although as there’s a sequel, maybe the loose ends will be tied up there. Incidentally, two of your guests’ picks from last year also ended up as book club reads for us – Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand, as picked by Ruth Martin, and Teresa Präauer’s Kochen im falschen Jahrhundert as recommended by Tess Lewis, both of which I enjoyed too.

My other favourite this year was Isabel Bogdan’s Laufen. The story of a woman rediscovering running as she deals with a shattering loss sounds pretty bleak, and it’s told in a stream-of-consciousness style that I don’t normally get along with, yet I enjoyed it a lot. The voice here is witty, angry, sarcastic and ends up hopeful. It drew me in right from the start, and finds a skillful balance to avoid being glib or clichéd about finding new strength and a way back to life… And having started running in my 40s and then had to stop, it made me look forward to being able to get back out there too!

Rachel Ward, MA, MITI, lives in Wymondham, near Norwich, UK, and has been working as a freelance literary and creative translator from German and French to English since gaining her MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. She specialises in children’s and young adult literature as well as crime fiction and other contemporary literature. Her non-fiction interests include history, politics, art, journalism and travel. She can be found on Bluesky as @racheltranslates.bsky.social and Instagram as @racheltranslates.

Best German Books 2024: Lucy Jones

16 December 2024

A head shot of translator Lucy Jones, a white woman with a gorgeous blond tangly fringe, in front of a stippled grey wall — Lucy Jones © Oliver Toth

Next up in our annual series of translators on their favourite reads of the year is Lucy Jones.

Elias Hirschl: Content

Hirschl’s humour is the driest kind. After Salonfähig, a grisly satire, he has now written a dystopian novel centred on young people who work for the Smile Smile content farm. Set in a ghost town that once thrived from coal production, Hirschl’s book is a caustic critique of the precarious and pointless nature of producing content. Daily tasks at Smile Smile consist of shredding old Nokias for AMSR videos, or producing endless listicles as clickbait. Early on, you get the sense that Hirschl might be drawing on his own experience: his empathy shines through for these wannabe artists who have put their ambitions on hold out of financial necessity. By the end, he suggests, people will be working for the internet, and not the other way round. Unless they are first swallowed up by manholes and AI starts running their lives. Shortlisted for the Austrian Book Prize in 2024.

Paula Fürstenberg: Weltalltage (Everyday Life, Suspended)

Lists appear too in Paula Fürstenberg’s novel about friendship and chronic illness, but with a very different intention. In her warm and witty prose, which was a pleasure to translate, lists are a structuring device. Through the lens of a friendship spanning from childhood to the fall of the Wall and up to the present day, Max and the female first-person narrator try to provide each other with the kind of love and care normally reserved for nuclear families. In doing so, Paula Fürstenberg takes up a very important debate about the role of care, how modern society requires our bodies to function, single parenthood, families of choice, depression and responsibility. I was caught up in their story right through to the end.

Lucy Jones is a translator from the German to English, mostly of fiction, and has lived in Berlin since the late 1990s where she founded the translators’ collective Transfiction in 2008. She has translated the works of Brigitte Reimann (Diaries 1955-1963 and Siblings), Theresia Enzensberger (Blueprint), and Anke Stelling (Higher Ground), among others. Check out some of her work at Words Without Borders!

Best German Books 2024: Jamie Bulloch

13 December 2024

Translator Jamie Bulloch, smiling — Translator and historian Jamie Bulloch

Second in our annual series of translators on their favourite reads of the year is Jamie Bulloch.

As each year passes, the proportion of books I read that are in German seems to grow. This year I’ve had more to choose from than ever and haven’t managed to narrow it down to fewer than five. Unlike last year, when all my three books could be loosely classified as autofiction, the selection here is quite eclectic.

I’ll begin with the most commercial of the titles, Ursula Poznanski’s Die Burg (Knaur). The setting here is a mediaeval castle, where a millionaire has installed a real-life escape game that, thanks to an AI, is tailor-made to each group which comes to play. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, as you might imagine. The guinea pigs invited to test the game soon find themselves trapped in a living nightmare, at the mercy of the AI’s sadistic whims. This thriller is most timely, huge fun, brilliantly paced and with a great cast of characters who range from sympathetic to loathsome. I can’t wait to see the TV/film adaptation that surely has to follow.

Also a thriller of sorts is Maria Lazar’s Leben verboten! (DVB). Otherwise it is a world away from Poznanski’s novel, having been written in 1932. Set in the Great Depression, it begins with a banker, Ernst von Ufermann, missing his plane, which then crashes. Believed dead, Ufermann is able to begin his life again, which takes him to Vienna where he becomes entangled with Austrian National Socialists trying to bring down their government. When he eventually returns to Berlin, nobody believes it’s him, which is fortunate because his wife has remarried. There are parallels with Ulrich Boschwitz’s Der Reisende, not least of which is that both only have appeared in German in recent few years. It’s both an exciting and fascinating read, and is crying out to be translated into English.

I ended my round-up last year looking forward to Arno Geiger’s new book. Reise nach Laredo (Hanser) did not disappoint. It couldn’t be more different from his previous novel, Unter der Drachenwand, set on the home front in rural Austria during WWII and written as a literary collage that reads like a collection of primary source material. Reise nach Laredo takes as its subject Charles V (1500–58), once the most powerful man on earth, but who now, ridden with gout, has abdicated and withdrawn to a Spanish monastery to see out his remaining days. The novel describes an imaginary, fantastical trip he takes from the monastery with an illegitimate son of his, during which he experiences adventure and finally finds true friendship. The book is touching, funny, intelligent and stunningly written by an author at the top of his game.

Unlike in 2023, I made a really poor stab at working my way through the German Book Prize shortlist this year, though I should add in my defence that there were a couple of really lengthy tomes that made the job more difficult. Happily for me, one of the two I did finish was the eventual winner, Martina Hefter’s Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir? (Klett-Cotta), my fourth choice. The novel presents the life of Juno, a dancer and performance artist in her early fifties, who is beset by financial worries and also acutely aware of how she is aging, concerned by how much time she might have left in her life. She also worries about her disabled husband, Jupiter, a writer. At night she leads a sort of double life, exchanging messages with individuals who purport to be rich Americans, but are in fact scammers from Africa, trying to trick money from Western women. With one of these scammers, Benu, she develops a deeper relationship; as she finds out more about him her mistrust slowly ebbs, though she doesn’t reveal to him that she is married. The writing is tight and suffused with melancholy, though not without humour, and the relationships Juno has with both her husband and Benu are incredibly touching. A surprise winner? Maybe, but no less deserving for that.

My final choice, Husch Josten’s Die Gleichzeitigkeit der Dinge (Berlin Verlag), first came to me because I was attracted by its cover. This novel, set in Cologne, focuses on a group of friends: Jean, a chef and writer; Sourie, an eccentric regular at Jean’s restaurant; and their mutual acquaintance, Tessa. Sourie works in an old people’s home and seems obsessed by mortality. In fact, he’s harbouring a dark secret, which Jean uncovers after Sourie’s untimely death, as he sets himself the task of writing about his friend’s life. The unchronological structure of the book allows the author to tease out the narratives of her characters’ lives, and postpone the revelation of the truth. Josten’s quirky, witty, playful book, with its philosophical meditations and nod to metafiction, is hard to categorise, but this is what makes it a distinctive and hugely enjoyable read. I’m very glad I judged this one by its cover.

Jamie Bulloch is a British historian and translator of German literature, with over fifty published titles to his name, and twice winner of the Schlegel-Tieck prize. His recent translations include books by Sebastian Fitzek, Daniela Krien, Romy Hausmann and Arno Geiger.

Best German Books 2024: Annie Rutherford

12 December 2024

Translator Annie Rutherford smiling in dark clothes in front of a sea wall with a Poseidon graffito — Annie Rutherford © Lou McCurdy

Continuing our annual series of translators on their favourite reads of the year, here is Annie Rutherford.

Isabel Bogdan: Wohnverwandtschaften

One of the things I love about Isabel Bogdan’s writing (which I, err, have spent quite a bit of time with – see The Peacock) is the way Isa draws her characters – endearing, slightly silly, full of quirks and contradictions – and above all how the relationships between these characters emerge and grow. So I was really excited when I heard the premise of her latest novel, Wohnverwandtschaften, in which four very different flatmates become something like found family. (I’m still puzzling over how I’d translate that pun of a title – Kiepenheuer & Witch’s foreign rights’ department have gone with The Four of Us.)

And oh, it is so lovely! And so heartfelt! And so sad but joyful but heart-wrenching but beautiful! (Isa, I have not yet forgiven you for that ending. Marketing team at K&W: your blurb did not prepare me.) You could be forgiven, I think, for underestimating this book when you start it – it begins gently, with short chapters, low stakes and Loriot references a plenty. But at its bold, beautiful, generous heart, Wohnverwandtschaften explores the questions which so many of us are grappling with at the moment: how do we build the communities of care that we want to live in? What if the way we want to live looks different to the image we’d always bought into? How do we care for each other for better, for worse, in sickness and in health when we aren’t partners or family – when, that is, neither society nor the state recognises the love that connects us?

Stefanie vor Schulte, tr. Alexandra Roesch: Boy with a Black Rooster

It’s always a delight when a book you’ve been wanting to read for ages proves to be just as good as you’d hoped it might be. I heard about Boy with a Black Rooster a good couple of years ago, when it was showcased by New Books in German, and was instantly sold on the premise: a fairy tale for adults with a child with a heart of gold, a wicked princess and, of course, a quest. I finally got my hands on a copy of the book this summer, when it came out in Alexandra Roesch’s evocative translation, and I devoured it in one afternoon sitting, curled up with a blanket and a hot chocolate.

The book follows Martin, the aforementioned gold-hearted child and one of the few characters to be granted a name, as he travels through a war-torn pseudo-medieval land, on the hunt for the children who have been going missing from villages. His meandering, often interrupted quest has hints of Hans Christian Anderson and Angela Carter. This is not, to be clear, an entirely happy tale (what true fairy tale is?), but – evocative, dreamlike and immersive – it gives the reader all the satisfaction of a really good story, beautifully told.

A writer, translator and project leader, Annie Rutherford makes things with words and champions poetry and translated literature in all its guises. Her current projects include Que(e)ry Points, a psychogeography walk about queerness, disability and landscape in Dorothy Wordsworth and Annette von Droste Hülshoff. She translates mostly from German, as well as from French, Russian and Belarusian. Her published translations include collections by poets Nora Gomringer and Volha Hapeyeva, as well as Isabel Bogdan’s novel The Peacock. She is currently translating Annette von Droste Hülshoff’s novella, The Jew’s Beech.

My German Book of the Year 2024

28 November 2024

A very beautiful and very thick book, Clemens Meyer's novel Die Projektoren — Die Projektoren

There was one novel that grabbed me so hard this year, it put all other books in the shade for months. You must know that phenomenon: a book so delicious, everything that comes after it tastes bland.

Enough metaphors. It was Clemens Meyer’s Die Projektoren.

As you may know, I’ve translated most of the author’s previous books. He and I were reading together in Ireland in the spring, and I got a peek at the manuscript on the Cork-to-Dublin train. It’s an unnerving feeling, reading a manuscript right opposite its writer. But I could tell the novel would be enormous, impressive, ambitious – and a little bit crazy. It also turned out to be 1057 pages long, once they typeset it.

A sweeping exploration of masculinity, movies and war, it is set in Leipzig, Hungarian-occupied Novi Sad, Tito-era Yugoslavia, post-communist Croatia and Serbia, and the Kurdish regions, spanning from 1942 to the mid-2010s. Meyer weaves a complex web of characters, times and places, strangely centred around the German pulp novelist Karl May – though he never makes a personal appearance. The book combines tragedy and absurd comedy while warning us of the rise of neo-fascists across Europe. I took a week off from translating to read the whole thing back home, where I found myself laughing a lot, and crying at several points – without ever feeling manipulated.

A very fat manuscript on a train table — The manuscript itself

There are plenty of did-you-know moments. Did you know that the definitive Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller was born in Romania? Did you know that both West and East Germany filmed Westerns in Yugoslavia? Did you know that the occupying Hungarian forces massacred three to four thousand people in and around Novi Sad in January 1942? Or that the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days in 1973?

Meyer creates meaty characters and builds his chapters around them, each in a different style. The projectionists of the title are a shadowy group of psychiatrists, some of them Nazis, who cut across time and place. There’s a romantic hero, a Croatian nicknamed the Cowboy who works on films in the Yugoslavian mountains and goes unexpected places. Marshall Tito and the actors Lex Barker, Pierre Brice and Mavid Popović do all sorts of things they probably didn’t do in real life – while one or two fictional characters from Karl May novels lead independent lives, believing themselves to be real.

Meyer is insistent the book is not historical fiction, and I think this organized chaos is part of that – plus the fact that he extends the action almost up to the present. He’s doing so much more than constructing a palatable story around historical facts. Actually, at times the story is far from palatable, such as when he writes about atrocities, war or neo-Nazis. Yet it is also a celebration of the life-saving power of cinema – quite literally, in one case. A plot does exist but it’s meandering and hinted at rather than driving the novel. I’m not sure I will ever understand it fully, or whether anyone is supposed to.

You’ll be pleased to hear I get to spend all of 2025 translating the book, for English publication by Fitzcarraldo Editions. If you can’t wait that long, there’s a lengthy recording of me reading part of the Novi Sad chapter for the Catch of the Day podcast. I genuinely believe this is a ground-breaking book, pushing the envelope of what writing can achieve.

German Book Prize 2024: the Longlist

27 August 2024

In the running… Clemens Meyer’s big fat novel Die Projektoren

What treasures lie in wait among the nominations for Germany’s biggest literary award?

A writer friend and I have an annual tradition, usually performed lying on towels at our local lido. On the morning of the announcement, we pick over the longlist for the German Book Prize and choose our favourite nominations, and also draw up a secret list of what we think the judges might put on the shortlist. This summer it’s been too hot to hang out outdoors during the daytime (and my pal was on holiday for the longlist announcement) so we postponed to a Sunday night on my balcony. Armed with the booklet of extracts and fuelled by a small amount of prosecco that happened to be in the fridge, we worked our way through the twenty listed titles.

Our unfiltered opinions aren’t always fit to print, but here comes a potted polite version, followed by my personal top six.

The longlist:

Nora Bossong: Reichskanzlerplatz
I’m not generally a fan of historical fiction, although Bossong tends to do it better than most. Still, this novel about Magda Goebbels’ lover before, during and after the Nazis doesn’t tickle my fancy.

Zora del Buono: Seinetwegen
I’m biased because I know the writer from a non-literary context, but this autofictional exploration about the man who killed del Buono’s father in a car accident is so intriguing, I went out and bought it for money.

Franz Friedrich: Die Passagierin
This is the first of a couple of novels on the list that apparently feature time travel, which can only shake things up a little, right? The extract is delightfully weird, setting up an unusual imaginary community.

Martina Hefter: Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?
Neither of us much liked the sound of this book about Juno and Jupiter and modern-day dating scammers, but actually the extract was playful and fun.

Timon Karl Kaleyta: Heilung
Another one that didn’t grab us, especially since last year’s prize already went to a novel about rich kids’ problems. May or may not be The Magic Mountain for today, but who’s to say that’s a good thing?

Maren Kames: Hasenprosa
Fun at last! Maren Kames performs twists and turns with language and both the blurb and the extract perked us both right up. Not sure what it’s about other than family, but I’ll find out when I read it, which will be soon.

Michael Köhlmeier: Das Philosophenschiff
More historical fiction, this time about an intellectual family put on a ship into exile by the Bolshevists, only to be joined by Lenin himself. The style seems rather formal and the subject… see above.

Daniela Krien: Mein drittes Leben
Krien is very successful commercially with her novels about women from East Germany, and good for her (and indeed for her English translator Jamie Bulloch, for Quercus). The extract shows off her writing skills but we’d still prefer it if the big prize went to a novel that would benefit more from the attention.

André Kubiczek: Nostalgia
I’ve read this novel and it’s great: very personal, very sad, very well written, very illuminating – an unusual perspective on the GDR from the son of a German father and a Laotian mother.

Ulla Lenze: Das Wohlbefinden
This one ticks two negative boxes: hospital setting and historical fiction. And yet! Lenze does seem to be doing something slightly different, bringing together three women: a working-class medium, a writer and a modern-day great-granddaughter. The extract is certainly a great read.

Clemens Meyer: Die Projektoren
It’s a little unfair because this novel (which I have read and which I’ll be spending 2025 translating for Fitzcarraldo) is utterly strange, massively ambitious and mind-blowingly good. With a little bit of time travel, sort of. It’s like pitting ducklings against eagles. Doesn’t mean it’ll win, though, other than in our hearts and minds.

Max Oravin: Toni & Toni
A debut novel by a poet, this one – about a hetero couple going through problems – excited me with its adventurously rhythmic language and smatterings of Japanese, but put my friend off.

Ronya Othmann: Vierundsiebzig
We were unsure whether this book can be strictly called a novel, seeing as it’s a personal reckoning with the 2014 Yezidi genocide. Perhaps its essayistic style is its strength – it’s certainly a daunting prospect on an important topic.

Mithu Sanyal: Antichristie
She’s done it again! Following Identitti, Sanyal brings a bizarre sense of humour to today’s debates, this time tackling the London-based birth of Hindu nationalism in another tale of time travel. I’m reading it right now, and it’s ace.

Stefanie Sargnagel: Iowa
Nice to see Austria’s top young literary provocateuse on the longlist, but we asked ourselves again whether a probably non-fictional book – about a writer’s trip to Iowa – really qualifies for an award for novels.

Dana von Suffrin: Nochmal von vorne
German readers do love a contemporary German-Jewish family story set between Munich and Tel Aviv. The extract feels a little muddy to me, however; I’m unsure where it’s going and wasn’t drawn in enough to find out.

Markus Thielemann: Von Norden rollt ein Donner
Absolutely beautiful writing in the extract, and the idea of this contemporary novel about a young shepherd and rabid nationalists really piqued our interest. Political fiction cutting through to the heart of the matter.

Ruth-Maria Thomas: Die schönste Version
Another debut, this time about a young woman’s desires, background and broken relationship, set in present-day East Germany. I like that the book made the list and the way it addresses social class, but the prose doesn’t excite me.

Doris Wirth: Findet mich
One of only two books published by indies on the longlist (the other being Toni & Toni), and another debut. It’s about a man breaking out of a Swiss family and it seems to be full of accepting and understanding, written with love in a calm tone.

Iris Wolff: Lichtungen
A booksellers’ favourite with rights already sold to the UK (Moth Books), this is the story of a childhood friendship in Communist Romania that endures to the present day. Again, we’re glad writers like Wolff are so successful with readers already, but would welcome the attention for books yet to find such a broad audience.

My personal shortlist (you can probably guess my personal winner):

Zora del Buono with Seinetwegen

Maren Kames with Hasenprosa

André Kubiczek with Nostalgia

Clemens Meyer with Die Projektoren

Mithu Sanyal with Antichristie

Markus Thielemann with Von Norden rollt ein Donner

The real shortlist is announced on 17 September.

Saša Stanisić: Möchte die Witwe angesprochen werden, platziert sie auf dem Grab die Gießkanne mit dem Ausguss nach vorne

12 August 2024

Short stories are such a big part of my life right now. I’m just finishing my translation of Judith Hermann’s We’d Have Told Each Other Everything – which isn’t actually a short story collection. What it is, I find hard to categorise, but it is a very beautiful and fascinating book about life and writing and it does draw on a lot of short stories. I was lucky enough to receive a small grant from the German Translation Fund, and that has enabled me to take time for close readings of lots of short stories in English. Some are referred to in the book, like the sublime work of Carson McCullers and John Burnside, and some I chose because I thought they might be helpful or because I had them already: Claire Keegan, Maggie Armstrong, Jan Carson. I’ve also been reading the late Margot Bettauer Dembo’s inspiring translations of Judith Hermann’s previous stories.

Starting in 1998 with what became Summerhouse, Later, her collections became bestsellers. I might compare the Judith Hermann phenomenon in Germany (at that time) to Sally Rooney among English-speaking readers: you just had to read her, and if you didn’t you were taking a deliberate stand – and missing out on something exquisite. (Did I, at the time? No, I was too busy having fun and then having a baby, and my German wasn’t yet good enough to appreciate her writing.) Other than Hermann, though, German short-story writers tend not to make the Spiegel Bestseller list.

Until now, that is, with Saša Stanisić following up on his German Book Prize-winning novel Where You Come From (as translated with astounding aplomb by Damion Searles) with a sort of short story collection that isn’t. The long title translates as When the Widow Wants Someone to Talk to Her, She Puts the Watering Can on the Grave with the Spout Facing Forward and the book is selling like ice cream on a holiday island.

Watering cans locked to a frame in a Berlin cemetery

If you know Stanisić’s work, you’ll know not to expect your classic narrative arc from exposition to resolution – that’s not what he’s interested in. His stories are a long way from the ones I’ve been reading, in other words, but I don’t want to knock either kind.

To me, his appeal lies in his joy in playfulness, from language to structure to the form of his books as a whole and even his approach to the laws of physics. I’d almost call these stories experimental, if that didn’t make them sound dry and unreadable. Because they are delightfully readable, introducing us to all sorts of characters who seem to leap off the page. Many of them get up to slightly strange antics like taking a bath while time stands still, or cheating at games against a small child, or feigning a holiday on the island of Helgoland but finding they committed a heinous crime there despite the lie, or indeed making contact to fellow mourners through the language of watering cans. They’re generally a little hapless, but all the more likeable for it. In short, they are funny.

Although a couple of the stories fit into that mild-mannered category of funny where readers identify with mundane irks in their lives, like the situation comedy of what to put in which recycling bin (I skipped one of these), the others combine an absurd sense of humour with a measure of melancholy. The holiday is feigned, we learn in a later piece, for economic and teenage coolness reasons. Stanisić’s sympathies lie squarely with society’s outsiders: a cleaner, a working-class widow in a gentrified neighbourhood, young single men with not much to do on their small-town Saturdays. Perhaps the occasional first-person narrator is the writer himself; he and his young friends in the opening story are certainly familiar from Where You Come From. And because he wishes his characters well – and because he’s the kind of writer he is – he finds a wonderful and mainly happy solution for them all at the end of the book.

What makes me mainly happy is that the book is doing so well. The last time I tried to read a German bestseller I got bored and angry about 50 pages in, and regretted having made the writer even richer. This time, I was delighted not only for myself, but also for all the other readers who’ll be discovering the joy to be had from unconventional storytelling. Oh, and the language! It’s so rich, the voices are so different – that sparse rhythm of teen-speak or an elderly woman’s interior pep talks, or playful cliché-riding in the Helgoland story. You could buy it and see, and make a daring writer richer.

August is Women in Translation Month

1 August 2024

Summer’s the perfect time to focus on women’s writing in translation, with #WiTMonth running all August on social media – and hopefully on your bookshelves.

The campaign’s been running for ten years now and we’ve seen a massive increase in women-authored books published in translation since Meytal Radzinski got the ball rolling in 2014. Back then, only 26% of published fiction translations into English were written by women. Through steady campaigning and appeals to editors and publishers, that shocking imbalance has been largely eradicated – last year’s stats show 47% of translated fiction was originated by women.

As you might have noticed, V&Q Books prides itself on publishing a whole lot of women writers. Three of our authors are men, with the other nine playing the woman card. For August, we’re offering 20% off all our women in translation, for readers in the UK and Ireland.

Just order via our website and enter the code WiT24 at the checkout.

Enjoy!