Ein Abend mit Christoph Ransmayr

In the organizer's words:

"No matter where, baby"

Micro novels - reading & pictures

Seventy pictures, seventy stories, seventy literary masterpieces

Here, someone visualizes his life in snapshots, skimming over continents and times in a narrative way and expressing the fleetingness of the moment, sometimes ironically, but always with passion and virtuosity.

In memory of the classic photo album, in which the adventures of the moment were documented in keywords under often blurred images, Christoph Ransmayr tells seventy stories condensed into micro-novels about seventy of his photographs in black and white in "Egal wohin, Baby". Each photo is a visual note, due to the randomness of presence and recorded in passing with a smartphone or digital camera. Each text accompanying the image becomes a self-contained, polished piece of prose: a micro-novel. Because expeditions into the moments of reality and the boundlessness of the imagination can also be told in just a few lines - especially when it is done with the powers of observation and the art of formulation of the worldly-wise Christoph Ransmayr.

Christoph Ransmayr was born in Wels/Upper Austria in 1954 and lives in Vienna again after years in Ireland and traveling. In addition to his novels "Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis", "Die letzte Welt", "Morbus Kitahara", "Der fliegende Berg", "Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit", "Der Fallmeister. A Brief History of Killing" and the "Atlas of an Anxious Man", playful forms of storytelling appear, including "Ladies & Gentlemen under Water", "Confessions of a Tourist", "The Wolf Hunter" (together with Martin Pollack) and "Medicine against Mortality". In 2022, the collection of poems and ballads "Unter einem Zuckerhimmel" (illustrated by Anselm Kiefer) was published, followed in 2024 by the collection of stories "Als ich noch unsterblich war" and the volume "Egal wohin, Baby" with photographs by the author. The volume "Bericht am Feuer" was published on Christoph Ransmayr's work. He has received numerous literary awards for his books, which have been translated into more than thirty languages, including the literary prizes named after Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich von Kleist, the Premio Mondello and, together with Salman Rushdie, the Prix Aristeion of the European Union, the Prix du meilleur livre étranger and the Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne, most recently the South Korean Park Kyung-ni Prize in 2023.

"[...] a Homer of our time, who collects the often nameless and hitherto unknown and puts it between two book covers to tell it to us readers." Terry Albrecht, WDR online , November 27, 2024

"[...] Homer of our time, who smuggles the traditional and uncertain into the present day." Frank Dietschreit, Rheinische Post , January 6, 2025

"This is a book that reminds us what an incredible ability literature [...] possesses." Denis Scheck, WDR3 - Mosaik , January 6, 2025

"Christoph Ransmayr is probably closer to [the Austrian] third Nobel Prize than anyone else." Heinz Sichrovsky, ORF III, January 14, 2025

"[...] the micro-novels also like to contrast the beauty and wonder of the world with the question of how suffering and death can exist right next to it." Jan Wiele, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 23, 2025

An event organized by the Brandenburgisches Literaturbüro, the Waschhaus Potsdam and the Literaturladen Wist.

Price information:

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