Der Literarische Salon mit Urszula Honek

In the organizer's words:

20:00 I Literature, discussion I 🎤 Concert hall

The salon with Anne de Marcken is unfortunately canceled for private reasons. Tickets remain valid or can be returned.

Rarely has a debut in Poland caused as much of a stir as Urszula Honek's novel "White Nights". Not only did she receive two of the most prestigious literary awards in her home country, the Conrad Prize and the Kościelski Prize. The English translation was nominated for the 2024 International Booker Prize. "Capturing the intense, dreamlike atmosphere of the setting, in which the 'white nights' serve as a backdrop for the characters' inner journeys, is the special quality of this book," the jury said in its vote: "It is a dark, lyrical exploration of people searching for meaning and belonging in a fleeting world." In fact, these are not narrated biographies, but rather moods of the soul that Honek captures in a - her? - sleepy village in the Beskids: Friends who know each other from school are looking for work, two already with death in their hearts. A little girl stands by her grandmother as she dies, without knowing it. An unmarried young woman, the only one who went to school in the nearby town, wants more from life than it can offer her. All of them, struggling with existential crises, use their own voices to create a narrative mosaic of thirteen interlinked stories.

Urszula Honek's large, slender village novel was published by Suhrkamp at the end of February in the excellent translation by Renate Schmidgall, and the local critics are also full of praise. "The village novel as an anti-idyll has a long tradition in Polish literature," said Nico Bleutge on Deutschlandfunk radio: "But Urszula Honek succeeds magnificently in drawing other lines into her stories, an eye for details of the psyche or a play with magical moments."

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Urszula Honek (author), Navid Kermani (host, moderation), Guy Helminger (host, moderation), Renate Schmidgall (translation), Anja Laïs (reader)