Award-winning Viennese author Anna Weidenholzer will read from her works and discuss her writing with acclaimed translator Tess Lewis on Fri., Jan. 22, 6:30 p.m. at NYU’s Deutsches Haus.
Award-winning Viennese author Anna Weidenholzer will read from her works and discuss her writing with acclaimed translator Tess Lewis on Fri., Jan. 22, 6:30 p.m. at NYU’s Deutsches Haus (42 Washington Mews at University Place).
The event, “Weekends on the Island,” is free and open to the public.
Critics have been lamenting the disappearance of fiction with characters from the working class or from the ranks of the unemployed and destitute, but see Weidenholzer as filling that void. Her recent story Island features a hapless amateur magician and a besotted real estate agent who spend their weekends on the Danube Island, Vienna’s favorite bathing spot. In an earlier novel, Winter is Good for Fish, she portrays a middle-aged woman in Vienna coming to terms with being labeled redundant—both as a “productive” wage-earner and as a widow.
Weidenholzer has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and has won many awards, including the Alfred Gesswein Prize (2009), the Residency Stipend at the Schloss Wiepersdorf (2011), the State Grant for Literature (2011/2012), and the Reinhard Priessnitz Prize (2013). Her debut novel Der Platz des Hundes (The Dog’s Place, 2010) was nominated for the European Festival of the Debut Novel in Kiel in 2011. Her second novel Der Winter tut den Fischen gut was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in fiction in 2013 and was featured at the New York Festival Neue Literatur in 2015. She currently is the Max Kade writer-in-residence at Deutsches Haus at NYU.
Lewis’s translations from French and German include works by Peter Handke, Alois Hotschnig, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Philippe Jaccottet, and the painter Anselm Kiefer. Her recent awards include a Max Geilinger Award, the Austrian Cultural Forum NY Translation Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
To RSVP, please email deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited; please arrive 10 minutes prior to the event. Please call 212.998.8660 for more information. Subways: N, R (8th St.); 6 (Astor Pl.)
This event is supported by the Max Kade Foundation.